South Africa

Ahead of shareholder meetings for the giant pharmaceutical corporations, the People’s Vaccine Alliance calculates that Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have paid out $26 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to their shareholders in the past 12 months.

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.

One year on from the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the People’s Vaccine Alliance is warning that developing countries are facing critical shortages of oxygen and medical supplies to cope with COVID-19 cases yet the majority have been unable to administer a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. In contrast rich nations have vaccinated their citizens at a rate of one person per second over the last month.

Max Lawson, Oxfam Head of Inequality Policy, responds to the G7’s limited progress on ensuring poor countries have access to COVID-19 vaccines, Max Lawson, Oxfam Head of Inequality Policy.

Thirty-two of the world’s largest companies stand to see their profits jump by $109 billion more in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare an economic model that delivers profits for the wealthiest on the back of the poorest, according to a new Oxfam report today.

The coronavirus pandemic is fast pushing developing countries toward a debt crisis that would be catastrophic for their fight against poverty, with the likelihood of multi-billion-dollar defaults that will hurt the entire global economy, warned Oxfam ahead of the G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting this weekend (July 18-19).

 

As many as 12,000 people could die per day by the end of the year as a result of hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than could die from the disease, warned Oxfam in a new briefing published today. The global observed daily mortality rate for COVID-19 reached its highest recorded point in April 2020 at just over 10,000 deaths per day.

40 million people in Southern Africa are at risk of increased hunger and poverty due to the double threat of the coronavirus and consecutive climatic shocks, warned Oxfam today. 

More than 52 million people in 18 countries across southern, eastern and central Africa are facing up to crisis levels of hunger as a result of weather extremes, compounded by poverty and conflict.

 

Areas hit by Cyclone Idai are “like a war zone” says Oxfam. The destruction and suffering are still not fully mapped. Despite initial appeals, international aid effort are still grossly underfunded, and aid agencies are already stretched and running out of resources.