Mark Suzman, CEO, Gates Foundation:
Yes, well, as Bill said, the main decision to actually accelerate the spend-down date and have a new sunset of 2045 was actually a discussion that Bill and I and the board started having well over a year ago, when we were trying to look back and say, where have we had the greatest successes over the last 25 years and how can we have the greatest impact over the next two decades?
And it really was in exactly that area of global health you’re talking about. So, the provision of vaccines for kids was the main reason for that reduction in preventable child mortality.
But we have also seen a halving of deaths in the incidence of HIV/AIDS, of tuberculosis, of malaria, and that we really think, by that 2045 deadline, there’s a plausible pathway to actually eradicate some of the diseases, like polio, like malaria, like potentially measles, and bring the other big ones like HIV and T.B. under control.
But that really does require partnerships. A big chunk of the success we had in the first two decades was because we did have fellow travelers coming along like the United States and the United Kingdom and France and Germany and others. And, as you say, rightly, they had already been started to have cutbacks. And then, this year, we have seen dramatic cuts from both the U.S.
The United Kingdom has cut, announced cuts of 40 percent. There are cuts elsewhere in Europe. And so we want to strongly make the case both that you can rely on the Gates Foundation to be a stable, reliable force at the scale we currently pay, and our payout is moving up to $9 billion a year. And this will allow us to be at $9 billion a year and above for the next two decades.
But we also want to bring those other funders back. We want to show them that this is the most impactful set of investments they could possibly make to save and improve human lives.
