trending Market Intelligence /marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/eDAr6cqE4_a4VhFb8B0NNg2 content esgSubNav
In This List

Gates may hold the key to turn Trump on global health, foreign aid investment

Blog

Europe: 5 key OTT trends to watch in 2022

Blog

Broadcast deal market recap 2021

Blog

Volume of Investment Research Reports on Inflation Increased in Q4 2021

Blog

Price wars in India: Disney+ Hotstar vs. Amazon Prime Video vs. Netflix


Gates may hold the key to turn Trump on global health, foreign aid investment

Billionaire technology titan and philanthropist Bill Gates said the key to convincing President Donald Trump to put money into areas he is inclined to reject may be to play to his desire to look presidential.

The Microsoft Corp. founder acknowledged he had very different perspectives than Trump on many frontsparticularly on the president's "America first" agenda.

"I don't agree with the first American rhetoric," Gates said during a March 15 Washington forum hosted by Politico.

The help the U.S. has provided to other nations over the past several decades has made the world "more stable, a richer place," Gates said.

He acknowledged his approach for doing business was also very different from Trump's.

"In business, you meet a lot of different kinds of people, and you have to be good at adapting to different styles of working," he said.

Gates said he thinks Trump likes the idea of putting money into new areas where he would be "personally exercising leadership," particularly if it is something "where presidential leadership would be important to make it happen."

The way to convince Trump to invest government funds in an area he may be reluctant about would be to "find things in common that you believe in" and then "be creative" in using that to convince him to do something that serves the country, he said.

Pleading for biomedical research, foreign aid funding

Gates was in Washington to persuade the administration and Congress to maintain, if not boost, funding for biomedical research and foreign aid, particularly in global health — areas Trump has sought to significantly cut.

Of the $130 billion expended by nations around the world on foreign aid, the U.S. is the largest contributor in dollars, providing $30 billion, Gates noted.

But that amount pales in comparison to the other nations when measured on the percentage of their economies.

"The figure of merit is what percent of your GDP do you give as foreign aid," Gates said.

The U.S. contribution is 0.22% of its gross domestic product, versus 1.1% for Norway, 1% for Sweden and 0.7% for the U.K and Germany each, he said.

"So, we are substantially less generous than those countries," Gates said.

He said he strongly disagrees with the "shock therapy" rhetoric in which some are calling for the U.S. to cut off foreign aid as a way to get poorer nations to step up and carry their own financial burden, or serve as a wake-up call to other countries to chip in more.

Slashing nearly $1 billion from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and winding the program down, as Trump has proposed to do, would be a form of shock for people with HIV because they would not get their medicines, Gates said.

"You die," he said. "And those people will no longer need foreign aid because they will be dead."

The PEPFAR program was started in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush with a $15 billion initial investment aimed at combating the global HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria epidemics, primarily for 15 of the hardest hit countries.

It has been largely credited for transforming the global HIV/AIDS response. Through the program, more than 13.3 million people with HIV have received antiretroviral treatments. The program provides HIV preventive and other services.

PEPFAR has been "absolutely miraculous" in holding HIV/AIDS in check, Gates said.

Poor nations are not going to be able to come up with the revenue to fill in the gap if the U.S. cuts PEPFAR, he said, adding that he does not understand the rationale behind weakening or dismantling the program.

"The story of foreign aid is you allow countries to lift themselves up so they become self-sufficient," Gates said. "It's hard for me to understand the notion that helping people who are poorer than we are is a bad thing."

"It's kind of in the Bible," he said to some chuckles from the audience.

Eradicating polio and addressing Alzheimer's

Gates, who met with Trump later in the day, also sat down a day earlier with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to discuss maintaining PEPFAR and to talk about two other areas of great interest to the philanthropist — eradicating polio and finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease.

Gates noted that polio continues to plague Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We are in a very, very critical phase" in addressing the disease, he said during the Washington forum.

"If we execute well and have a little bit of luck, this will be the last year any child gets paralyzed by polio, ever."

Gates recently made a large investment of his own money, not his foundation's, in Alzheimer's and related dementia diseases — giving $50 million to the private Dementia Discovery Fund and pledging another $50 million for startup companies.

"Whoever creates a drug that cures Alzheimer's will make billions and billions of dollars," he said. "And yet, it's a target that has proven to be very, very difficult."

There have been more failed clinical trials with Alzheimer's treatments than any other disease, Gates noted. "And these are very expensive trials because the gold standard is improving behavior on a cognition test, and that takes, in some cases, six to eight years," he said.

The human and economic costs of Alzheimer's and dementia are "absolutely gigantic," he said, adding that a lot of that liability is falling on the government to handle.

Even though the U.S. investment in Alzheimer's has been "very generous" compared with other nations, it has not been enough, Gates said.

But he was hopeful, given the backing on Capitol Hill by some to push for an increase from $400 million to about $2 billion in annual spending for the National Institute on Aging.

"That is as fast a growth as the National Cancer Institute had at the beginning of the war on cancer," Gates said.