pharmaceutical corporations

For every new billionaire created during the pandemic — one every 30 hours — nearly a million people could be pushed into extreme poverty in 2022 at nearly the same rate, reveals a new Oxfam brief today. “Profiting from Pain” is published as the World Economic Forum — the exclusive get-together of the global elite in Davos — takes place for the first time face-to-face since COVID-19, a period during which billionaires have enjoyed a huge boost to their fortunes. 

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. 

The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day— during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty. 

Campaigners from the People’s Vaccine Alliance say the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to openly share their vaccine science and technology and the lack of action from rich countries to ensure access to vaccines globally have created the perfect breeding ground for new variants such as Omicron.

In response to the announcement that AstraZeneca is to move away from the non-profit model for COVID vaccines, Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s Health Policy Manager and spokesperson for the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said: “AstraZeneca is breaking its repeated and celebrated public promises of a non-profit vaccine for all countries for the duration of this pandemic and to never to make a profit in any low- and middle-income country from this publicly funded vaccine."
 

Responding to an International Labour Organisation’s report, ILO Monitor: COVID-19 and the world of work, campaigners have called global vaccine inequality “a collective act of social and economic self-harm”.

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.

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”. 

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.

Responding to the announcement that COVAX has received more funding and is planning to accelerate its vaccine rollout, Oxfam International’s Head of Inequality Policy, Max Lawson, said: “More funding for COVAX and a quicker rollout of vaccines is a small piece of good news for developing countries struggling to get the doses they need, but at best fewer than a quarter of people in these countries will have been vaccinated by the end of the year."