In these two years of pandemic, the ten richest men in the world have more than doubled their fortunes, from 700 to 1,500 billion dollars, at a rate of 15,000 dollars per second, 1.3 billion dollars a day. Over the same period 163 million people fell into poverty due to Covid. The complaint comes from the Oxfam report significantly entitled “The pandemic of inequality”, released on the occasion of the opening of the works of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which will take place remotely.
The virus of inequality
“Since the start of the Covid-19 emergency, every 26 hours a new billionaire has joined an elite of over 2,600 super-rich whose fortunes increased by a whopping $ 5 trillion, in real terms, between March 2020 and November 2021 “, reads the document of the non-governmental organization. Only for Jeff Bezos, the number one of Amazon, one of the companies whose turnover took off with Covid-19, Oxfam calculates a “capital surplus” in the first 21 months of the pandemic of 81.5 billion dollars, the equivalent of estimated cost of vaccination (two doses and booster) for the entire world population.
Oxfam notes that even the virus of inequality, not just the coronavirus, has devastating effects: every four seconds a person dies from lack of access to treatment, from the consequences of the climate crisis, from hunger, from gender-based violence.
The crisis caused by the health emergency, then, hit women the hardest, who lost 800 billion dollars in income in 2020. For 2021, an estimated 13 million fewer women are employed than in 2019. Furthermore, women have seen significantly increase the load of unpaid care work.
In this situation, central banks have intervened by pumping trillions to support the economy. “But much of these resources – he says Gabriela Bucher, director of Oxfam International – ended up in the pockets of billionaires riding the stock market boom. “” Already at this moment, the ten super-rich hold six times the wealth of the poorest 40% of the world‘s population, made up of 3.1 billion people – he added – Even if they saw the value of their fortunes reduced by 99.993%, they would still be titled members of the global top-1% “.
The issue of vaccines
Then there is the sharp increase in profits in the pharmaceutical sector, “fundamental in the fight against the pandemic, but subject to the logic of profit and reluctant to temporarily suspend patents” to increase the production of vaccines and save lives in the poorest countries. According to Oxfam, the monopolies held by Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have made it possible to make profits “of $ 1,000 per second and create five new billionaires”. At the same time, “less than 1% of their vaccines have reached people in low-income countries”.
The percentage of people infected with Covid who die from the virus in developing countries – says the international confederation of 20 organizations working together in over 90 countries – is about double that of rich countries, while today in countries low-income only 4.81% of the population has been vaccinated.
Covid, half the world is vaccinated, but the poorest part is still fighting for a dose
by Elena Dusi
The proposal
To overcome the disparity in access to Covid vaccines, Oxfam is asking governments to impose a one-time tax of 99% on earnings from the pandemic on the ten richest men on the planet. In this way, more than 800 billion dollars would be obtained, a figure “sufficient to vaccinate the whole world” and to guarantee “health systems for all”, but also to “compensate for the damage caused by climate change and launch policies to combat the violence of gender “, argued Bucher pointing out that the ten billionaires after this withdrawal would in any case remain richer than they were at the beginning of the global health emergency.
After so many shadows, the report notes a positive aspect: the United States and China are starting to consider policies aimed at combating inequalities, from increasing taxation on who owns the most to action against monopolists.
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