The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. are set to pledge an additional USD60 million to a public-private partnership that supports HIV treatment and prevention in Botswana.
This new funding pledge to Botswana’s African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnership brings Merck’s and Gates’ support for the initiative at USD166.5 million, the Wall Street Journal says. The drug company said it will also continue donating HIV medicines to the program.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates was criticized regarding his recent partnership with Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim in pursuing child health initiatives in Southern Mexico and Central America.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Health Institute of the Carlos Slim Foundation, Inter-American Development Bank and the Spanish government announced in June a five-year initiative to improve the delivery of health services in the said areas, as reported by Devex.
An Australian academic wrote to the medical journal The Lancet to urge Gates to opt out of the partnership, which he says is inconsistent with the the foundation’s philanthropic principles.
“Gates’ decision just two months later to partner with Slim is plainly inconsistent,” Simon Chapman of the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health wrote as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. “He might well not have known about Slim’s tobacco connections when he joined with him in the Latam project. He must know now.”
Chapman, who is also an anti-tobacco campaigner, urged Gates to replicate his decision in April, when he cancelled a grant awarded to a Canada-based research institute whose chairwoman was found to be associated with a tobacco company.
