The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has teamed up with FC Barcelona (which, for you non-soccer fans, is thought to be the best team in the world) to promote the polio eradication campaign.
“Just as football is a universal sport with the power to transform lives, vaccines are a universal tool with the power to save lives,” said club manager Josep Guardiola.
As this video below emphasizes, we’re close to ending polio. As this recent article in The Economist notes, it won’t be easy. (It’s a great video clip, but I still don’t quite get the theme “More than a Goal.”)
SIDE NOTE: If you happen to just do a Google News search for the Gates Foundation today, you might see ranked high this headline about “Gates Foundation orders vaccination at gunpoint.” The story is attributed by something called NewsOne to the Malawi Voice, a government-run (and already somewhat dubious) news organization that apparently pulled the story off its website.
The story is absurd, of course, but a good reminder of how the robotic, self-selecting web can promote news stories of little or no merit based solely on a sensational headline:
