The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will expand its operations in 2022, notwithstanding their founders’ divorce, chief executive officer Mark Suzman has assured.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Suzman said that the foundation’s decision to expand grantmaking was motivated by the Covid pandemic, which has been blamed for halting and reversing anti-poverty, development and health initiatives in poor nations.
“The pandemic has slowed, halted, and even reversed hard-won gains in global health and development,” Suzman wrote in an annual letter published Wednesday. “After nearly two decades of unprecedented progress, we have seen tens of millions of people thrown back into poverty, childhood vaccination rates drop, and diseases from malaria to tuberculosis resurge,” he added.
Suzman, who joined Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates along with three other trustees after former trustee and billionaire Warren Buffett resigned last year, characterized the couple’s divorce as “a shock” to the foundation, but added that the pair has nonetheless continued to work “very efficiently” after separating.
The couple has poured an additional $15 billion into the $50 billion foundation after their divorce.
The other new members of the new board include Zimbabwean billionaire and vaccine envoy Strive Masiyiwa, London School of economics director Minouche Shafik, and charity consultant Tom Tierney.
Gates and his foundation have been praised by Western governments and media for their efforts against the pandemic, including in the development of new vaccines. However, an investigation by MintPress News in November put a dent in the nonprofit’s reputation after revealing that on top of his grants to drug companies, the billionaire set up a fund worth at least $319 million to bankroll hundreds of media outlets, ostensibly in the interests of assuring favourable media coverage of himself and his foundation.
Gates recently put out conflicting predictions about the future of Covid, saying in December that the global health emergency could end in 2022 and that the Omicron variant could come to be treated like the seasonal flu, but also warning that vaccines may be required for “years” to come, and announcing last week that new, deadlier diseases may soon befall the planet.
20 January 2022, 11:57 GMT