Bill Gates has, unsurprisingly, taken a data-driven approach to disease eradication during his second and staggering act as a philanthropist of the highest rank. Aiming to eliminate polio in the near term from the entire world as it has been in India, he told Ezra Klein of the Washington Post how the intransigence of illness is often not virus nor bacteria but misinformation:

“Ezra Klein:

So what did we learn that made eradication possible in India?

Bill Gates:

The two things that were done super well were social mobilization and mapping where the houses were. When somebody would refuse to take the vaccine, they would mark it down and they would have either a political leader or religious leader come in and convince them. Dealing with refusals is a huge part of this. If your team goes in, maybe they don’t speak the dialect, they’re not the same caste, the family has heard a rumor that the vaccine is bad, there’s many reasons you get refusals, and so you need follow-up for refusals. Usually you’ll get 10 to 20 percent refusals. But if there’s been a rumor, you get much higher refusals.

Ezra Klein:

A rumor that, say, the vaccine is bad, or it makes you sick?

Bill Gates:

Yeah or that the U.S. government uses vaccination campaigns to sterilize Muslim women. Vaccination always has problems with rumors. The U.S. doesn’t achieve nearly as high a vaccination rate as many countries. Vietnam is 99 percent vaccination, the U.S. is about 95 percent. Because people just hear ‘Oh, what about autism or something.’ But it’s particularly bad in poor countries.” (Thanks Browser.)