不久前比尔·盖茨在美国加州长滩市(Long Beach)举行的TED2010会议上做关于碳排放的演讲,题目是《创新到零》(Innovating to Zero)。在讲话开始后4分30秒的时候,他说道:
“目前的世界人口有68亿,并且正在上涨到90亿。现在,如果我们能在新型疫苗、卫生保健、生殖健康服务方面做一些真正超级棒的工作的话,我们也许能降低10%~15%的人口。”────这段话的亮点是,盖茨公开提到:新型疫苗可以作为一种降低世界人口的方法。
“First we've got population. Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3”
Well, the most exciting thing I learned when I was jus*etting into philanthropy was that, if you reduce childhood deaths, if you improve health in a society, that, surprisingly, population growth goes down. And that's because a parent needs to have some children survive into adulthood to take care of them when they're old.
And so, if they think having six children is what they need to do to have at least two survive, that's what they'll do. And amazingly, across the entire world, as health improves, then the population growth actually is reduced.
And there's a miracle intervention, which is vaccines. In 1960, over 20 million children died. In 2005, less than 10 million died. And that's despite much larger global population.
That is huge progress. And a lot of that is because these vaccinations are being given broadly, over half of that improvement. Another part is from economic development.
And so, even in the poorest countries, we should go in and give them a malaria vaccine, and give them vaccines for diarrheal diseases. And if a mother wants to limit her family size, give her the tools that let her have that possibility.