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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.

Rohingya people in Myanmar and Bangladesh say they feel trapped and that their lives are on hold two years on from a campaign of violence that forced hundreds of thousands to flee.

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).

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.  

The COVID-19 death toll has been four times higher in lower-income countries than in rich ones, according to a new report published today by Oxfam on behalf of the People’s Vaccine Alliance as the world marks two years since the World Health Organization declared the pandemic. 

This report describes some of the work that Oxfam International has done so far around the world in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Three months into the crisis, we have reached over 4.5m people and aim to reach 14m people by raising €100m. 

"The unprecedented global health crisis must be met with a vaccine plan that puts people ahead of the profits of big pharmaceutical companies," said Oxfam ahead of the Coronavirus Global Response Summit on Monday 4 May, which aims to raise $8 billion to develop vaccines, treatments and tests to help end the Covid-19 pandemic.

The IMF has already said that the coronavirus pandemic will trigger the worst economic fallout since the Great Depression —if ever there was a time to expand SDR allocations in a major way, it is now, said Oxfam today in response to the communiqué of the International Monetary and Financial Committee.