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The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that governments can take extraordinary measures to protect their citizens when spurred to action. We need to see more of this to address gender-based violence. We need to make the world safer for women, girls, and LGBTQI+ people. Here are five brilliant questions you asked about Oxfam’s recent report and our work on gender justice.

Developing countries have been hit with an endless tide of inadequate gestures and broken promises from rich countries and pharmaceutical companies, who are failing to deliver billions of doses they promised while blocking the real solutions to vaccine inequality, according to a new report published today by the People’s Vaccine Alliance. 

“People have become complacent about COVID-19. Our global (health) funds are fast running out of money. Vaccine inequity is getting worse,” said former UK prime minister Gordon Brown today. 

Over 1,000 health professionals from 66 countries have signed a letter urging the G20 to cancel the debt of developing countries, ahead of tomorrow’s extraordinary G20 Finance Ministers meeting.

While the United States faces the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression because of COVID-19, a subset of corporations is reaping dramatic profits that are flowing to their already wealthy, mostly white male shareholders, further exacerbating existing inequalities, according to a new analysis released by Oxfam today.

The Coronavirus crisis could result in a catastrophic loss of life in poorer countries and push half a billion more people into poverty. This week, the G20 finance ministers, the IMF and the World Bank can offer an instant lifeline – by cancelling all external debt payments for 2020. This could save $40 billion immediately and support almost 500 million of the world’s poorest to survive this crisis.

A one-off 99 percent levy on billionaires’ wealth gains during the pandemic could pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide a $20,000 cash grant to all unemployed workers, according to new analysis released today by Oxfam, the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Patriotic Millionaires.

In reaction to Pfizer’s announcement of voluntary licenses of its COVID-19 oral antiviral treatment Paxlovid to the Medicines Patent Pool, People’s Vaccine Alliance spokesperson and Oxfam America’s Senior Advocacy Advisor, Robbie Silverman, said: “Pfizer’s announcement to voluntarily licence the COVID treatment Paxlovid is welcome but is far from enough."     

An article in the British Medical Journal and Die Welt, published today, has found that the KenUP Foundation - acting as a consultant on behalf of BioNTech – has been pushing South African manufacturers not to get involved the World Health Organization Vaccine Technology Transfer Hub’s project of copying the manufacturing process of existing mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and have been calling for the project to be ‘terminated immediately’. 

In reaction to the newly announced $10.3 billion UN Humanitarian Response Plan (UNHRP) appeal, Oxfam’s Head of Humanitarian Campaigns and Advocacy, Fionna Smyth, said: “We welcome this boost to the UN Covid-19 humanitarian appeal. Millions of people around the world already struggling to cope with crises brought about by conflict, poverty and climate change, have been hit even harder now by the coronavirus pandemic which has also fuelled a hunger crisis. This funding is lifesaving and urgently needed, yet less than a quarter of the previous appeal had been met."