In the first two years of the pandemic, the ten richest men in the world have more than doubled their assets, from 700 to 1,500 billion dollars, at a rate of 15 thousand dollars per second, 1.3 billion dollars a day. Over the same period 163 million people fell into poverty as a result of the pandemic. The complaint comes from the Oxfam report The pandemic of inequality, on the occasion of the opening of the works of the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Since the beginning of the Covid-19 emergency, every 26 hours a new billionaire has joined an elite made up of over 2,600 super-rich whose fortunes have increased by as much as 5 trillion dollars, in real terms, between March 2020 and November 2021 », denounces 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. The pandemic also hit women hardest, who lost $ 800 billion in incomes in 2020. Still, while male employment is showing signs of recovery, it is estimated that 13 million fewer women are employed by 2021 than in 2019. A pandemic of inequalities in which central banks have intervened by pumping trillions to support the economy.
“But most of these resources – says Gabriela Bucher, director of Oxfam International – ended up in the pockets of the billionaires who ride the stock market boom”. Then there is the boom 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 with COVI-19 who die from the virus in developing countries – denounces the NGO – is about double that of rich countries, while to date in low-income countries only 4 has been vaccinated, 81% of the population.