Is Bill Gates a “Good” Billionaire?

Paris Marx is joined by Tim Schwab to discuss how Bill Gates wields his wealth to shape public policy, the many conflicts of interest of Bill and his Foundation, and how legitimate criticism of power is being positioned as conspiracy.

Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist whose recent work on the Gates Foundation has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Review of Journalism, and the British Medical Journal. Follow Tim on Twitter as @TimothyWSchwab.

• Tim wrote about the Gates Foundation’s conflicts of interest, in particular during the pandemic. He also wrote about how Gates’ funding of media and health data produces accountability and transparency problems.
• Paris had a viral thread about Gates’ intervention in the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, after which an interview said it was a conspiracy theory.
• After getting the rights to the Oxford vaccine, AstraZeneca ran into trouble in clinical trials.
• The Associated Press found three factories in Bangladesh alone that could be producing vaccines if patent protections were waived.
• The Mail and Guardian in South Africa published an article on Bill Gates’ complicity in vaccine apartheid and the author’s Twitter account was locked for tweeting about it.
• In 2015, Thomas Piketty talked to the BBC about the problems with billionaire philanthropy.

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