In a presentation entitled “Innovating to Zero!”, Bill Gates advocated reducing two byproducts of man: carbon emissions and children. He said, "First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent."
Indeed, if you listen to his presentation - which you can access in full here - reducing the population via use of vaccines and other means is the first thing on his list. And reading the comments which follow that video is also instructive. One person, for instance, had this to say:
Population is growing at a rapid pace in many economically developing countries and there is a continuing need of an alternate method for regulation of fertility. We proposed several years back a birth control vaccine which induces the formation of antibodies against the human pregnancy hormone, the human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG).Another said this:
I believe a huge reason Vaccines are so important is because when Women spend less time caring over a small child with malaria who has almost no chance of survival they will spend more time producing (higher GDP) and more time gaining an education.In other words, the bottom line (the almighty dollar) is more important than the life of a child, and by developing and using an anti-pregnancy vaccine, we can improve the world economy and the environment.
All that, in one fatal blow. (Or 900,000,000 fatal blows if you figure on Gates' lesser estimate of the potential for reduction in world population.)
I don't know who said it: "The only strength of the poor is in their numbers". A vaccine seems a very slow and expensive way of dealing with over-population - wouldn't a nuclear bomb be more efficient?
ReplyDeleteFunny isn't it, that people who believe the earth is over-populated never think of themselves as surplus to requirements!