On top of that, the care that is often provided by the private sector comes from quacks. We found an incredible proportion of quacks in Jharkhand, particularly, but a significant proportion even in West Bengal, who provide almost no serious medical attention and instead give saline injections for malaria, which is not really known anywhere in the world as a cure.

Bill Gates

2005 World Health Assembly

May 16, 2005

In my view—and there is no diplomatic way to put this: The world is failing billions of people. Rich governments are not fighting some of the world’s most deadly diseases because rich countries don’t have them. The private sector is not developing vaccines and medicines for these diseases, because developing countries can’t buy them. And many developing countries are not doing nearly enough to improve the health of their own people.

Let’s be frank about this. If these epidemics were raging in the developed world, people with resources would see the suffering and insist that we stop it. But sometimes it seems that the rich world can’t even see the developing world. We rarely make eye contact with the people who are suffering—so we act sometimes as if the people don’t exist and the suffering isn’t happening.
All these factors together have created a tragic inequity between the health of the people in the developed world and the health of those in the rest of the world.