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Today, a group of 83 millionaires from seven countries, the “Millionaires for Humanity”, released an open letter to governments, calling for a permanent tax increase on the very wealthiest to help pay for the global recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

On the eve of President Biden’s global COVID-19 summit on the side-lines of the UN General Assembly, campaigners from the People’s Vaccine Alliance are calling for world leaders to go beyond empty promises of charity and deliver bold action to increase manufacturing and access to COVID-19 vaccines around the world.

Responding to the IMF Board of Governors’ approval of a Special Drawing Rights (SDR) allocation of $650 billion, Nadia Daar, Head of Oxfam International’s Washington DC Office, said: “New SDRs will bring much-needed liquidity to struggling developing countries without adding to their unsustainable debt burdens. Now that this historic SDR issuance has been approved, governments must work transparently and together with civil society to ensure these resources are used to rescue collapsing health services and bolster social protection, and to deliver a fair and climate just recovery.  

The World Bank’s report shows clearly that billions of people were more vulnerable to the economic impacts of COVID-19 because of decades of economic policies which have kept them living one paycheck away from poverty, while the richest in society accumulate ever more wealth.

Very low spending on public healthcare, weak social safety nets and poor labor rights meant the majority of the world’s countries were woefully ill-equipped to deal with COVID-19, reveals new analysis from Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI) today.

Oxfam in Paraguay today announced its involvement in a campaign to get “public lands” into the hands of landless young people. 1980 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel is supporting the campaign, co-organized by local communities and the Articulacion Curuguaty (Curuguaty Network).

The total number of signatories of the petition to the President of Paraguay demanding a postive solution for farmers reached 37,574, according to the organizers of the campaign, “Young with no land = Land with no future”.

Young people ages 15-24 account for a sixth of the global population, 1.2 billion people whose lives, educations, careers and communities will be forever transformed by Covid-19. So why are they not being included in policymaking decisions that will continue to affect their lives for generations to come?

More than 170 former heads of state and government and Nobel laureates, including former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown, former President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos, former President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former President of France François Hollande and Nobel Laureates Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Professor Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, today called on President Biden to support a waiver of intellectual property rules for COVID-19 vaccines and pursue a people’s vaccine to end the pandemic in an open letter today.

“We needed the World Health Assembly to unite behind a People’s Vaccine, not a Trump Administration seeking scapegoats for a pandemic it has mis-handled from the start", said Anna Marriott, Health Policy Manager at Oxfam, commenting at the closure of the World Health Assembly today.