Bill Gates funds $26.5 million livestock vaccine to stop cows from farting
An investment fund founded by controversial billionaire Bill Gates raised $26.5 million for a Boston vaccine developer to reduce livestock methane gas emissions.
The goal is to tackle so-called climate change by injecting animals with a vaccine that would make them fart and burp less. Climate activists claim that farts and burps from livestock amount to more than 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, Axios reports.
Scientists say that methane has a significantly stronger ability to trap atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide.
ArkeaBio received the initial funding from Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which was later joined by Grantham Foundation, AgriZeroNZ, Rabo Ventures, Overview Capital and The51 Food & AgTech Fund.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures supplied the vaccine developer with the first $12 million, according to the outlet.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a long history of funding vaccine distribution and research. The stated goal is “to advance public goods for global health through technological innovation by accelerating the development and commercialization of novel vaccines and the sustainable manufacture of existing vaccines, defining the global disease burden through better primary data and world-class modeling, and reducing the threat of epidemics through the development and use of innovative tools.”
The foundation has funded Covid vaccines, HPV, polio, HIV, and others.