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Oxfam International is pleased to announce the appointment of Amitabh Behar as its new interim Executive Director. Behar is currently Executive Director for Oxfam India. He will assume the role for approximately 12 months, starting on 1 May 2023.

The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) has quietly divested from New Globe Schools, better known as Bridge International Academies (BIA), a for-profit school chain operating in four African countries and India. The IFC has invested $13.5 million in BIA since 2014, with the intention of supporting the company’s expansion to other countries.

In reaction to the Government of India’s decision to refuse renewal of Oxfam India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) registration, Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India said: “The restriction will severely affect our ongoing crucial humanitarian and social work in 16 states across the country.

More doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been delivered to the EU, the UK and the United States in the six-week run up to Christmas than African countries have received all year, new analysis from the People’s Vaccine Alliance reveals today.

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." 
 
 

New figures from the Peoples Vaccine Alliance reveal that the companies behind two of the most successful COVID vaccines – Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna – are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute. The figures based on the latest company reports are released as CEOs from pharmaceutical industry meet for the annual STAT summit —the equivalent of a ‘Big Pharma Davos’— from 16-18 November.

In response to the announcement that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has granted emergency use license for the COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, developed by Bharat Biotech in India, People’s Vaccine Alliance spokesperson and Oxfam Health Policy Manager, Anna Marriott, said: "Another approved vaccine to fight COVID-19 is fantastic news. We strongly encourage Bharat Biotech to show pandemic leadership and do the right thing for humanity by agreeing to share the vaccine technology and rights with the WHO's COVID Technology Access Pool, so that more manufacturers around the world can produce them.

More than 140 former heads of state and government and Nobel laureates today called on the candidates to be the next German chancellor Annalena Baerbock, Olaf Scholz, and Armin Laschet to declare themselves in favour of waiving intellectual property rules for COVID-19 vaccines and transferring vaccine technologies, and “to make these the policies of any future coalition government”. 

Using land alone to remove the world’s carbon emissions to achieve ‘net zero’ by 2050 would require at least 1.6 billion hectares of new forests, equivalent to five times the size of India or more than all the farmland on the planet, reveals a new Oxfam report today.

The cost of vaccinating the world against COVID-19 could be at least five times cheaper if pharmaceutical companies weren’t profiteering from their monopolies on COVID-19 vaccines, campaigners from the People’s Vaccine Alliance said today.