If, for most people, the pandemic has caused economic loss, the 10 richest men in the world, during the last two years, they have more than doubled their assets, which went from 700 to 1500 billion dollars. $ 15,000 per second, $ 1.3 billion per day. The report by Oxfam, “The pandemic of inequality”, published for the World Economic Forum of Davos. During the same period, due to Covid, 163 million people fell into poverty.
And the inequalities have dramatic effects: every four seconds a person dies from lack of access to care, for the consequences of the climate crisis, for hunger, for gender violence.
The most economically affected from the crisis caused by the pandemic it was the women, which in 2020 lost $ 800 billion in income and on which the burden of unpaid care work has increased significantly.
«Already at this moment the ten super-rich have six times the wealth of the poorest 40% of the population worldwide, made up of 3.1 billion people, ”explained Gabriela Bucher, director of Oxfam International. “Even if they saw the value of their fortunes reduced by 99.993%, they would still be titled members of the global top-1%.”
“Since the beginning of the Covid-19 emergency, every 26 hours a new billionaire joins an elite of more than 2,600 super-rich», Reads the report,« whose fortunes increased by as much as 5 trillion dollars, in real terms, between March 2020 and November 2021 ». An example: the “capital surplus” of Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, whose turnover took off, according to Oxfam, in the first 21 months of the pandemic, reached 81.5 billion dollars. Which is equivalent to the estimated cost of vaccination – two doses and boosters – for the entire world population.
In this context, the pharmaceutical sector, «fundamental in the fight against the pandemic», proved to be «subject to the logic of profit and reluctant to temporarily suspend patents to increase the production of vaccines and make them available even in the poorest countries. The monopolies held by Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have allowed a gain of “a thousand dollars per second” and the birth of “five new billionaires”. However “less than 1% of their vaccines have reached people in low-income countries»: The percentage of people who die from Covid in developing countries is about double that of rich countries, and in low-income countries only 4.81% of the population has been vaccinated.
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