can you elaborate on your first point? i've read fringe theories relating modern healthcare philanthropy with a sublimated form of eugenics, but they've all struck me as somewhat polarized and devoid of evidence
The TLDR is that the researchers did not prepare subjects sufficiently before they consented to study, so they did not give informed consent. This most likely has lead to the avoidable death of 254 women.
Disclosure: I'm friends with the author.
> If, at any time during the past 15+ years, the 138,624 Indian women in unscreened control groups had been told the simple truth that “even screening women once in a life-time at an appropriate age in low-resource countries may reduce the incidence of cervical cancer by 30%,” these women would have left their control groups and obtained screening on their own. To suggest, as do Sankaranarayanan et al, that Indian women would knowingly consent to be randomly assigned to more death – instead of to more life – is to suggest that Indian women are unimaginably stupid. [0]
I don't know how the Gates Foundation functions, so the level of which Bill should be implicated in the failings of this study are unclear to me. It sounds like the study would have been fairly inexpensive, and thus relegated to maybe just a footnote on one afternoon for Bill.
The eugenics-style arguments seen up in the parent comment seem to be a result of over-extrapolation of his "Innovating to zero" TED talk[1]. He alludes to, but does not cite, statistics correlating quality of life, health, and number of children. I also cannot find a concrete source, but playing around with wolfram alpha, it seems like there is at least a correlation according to their datasets[2].
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates/transcript?language=en#... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+%7C+ch...