World’s 10 richest men doubled their wealth during Covid-19, while inequalities widened, Oxfam says

COVID-19 has not affected the fortunes of the world’s ten richest men, but they have more than doubled their fortunes by USD15,000 per second, or USD 1.3 billion a day, according to an Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam) report published on Monday.

Using Forbes Magazine’s ranking of the top 10 richest people as of November 30, Oxfam’s report shows that their fortunes have grown by USD821 billion since March 2020, including Elon Musk (Tesla), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Bernard Arnault & family (LVMH), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Steve Ballmer (Former CEO of Microsoft), and Warren Buffet (Stocks: Bank of America, Apple, Coca Cola).

However, during the first two years of the pandemic, 99% of people’s incomes dropped, and over 163 million people had been driven below the poverty line, said the same report titled “Inequality kills, ”published ahead of the World Economic Forum.

Oxfam stated that inequality is contributing to the death of at least 21,000 people each day, or one person every four seconds mainly due to the lack of access to healthcare, gender-based violence, hunger, and climate disasters.

Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher said, “Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom. Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to billions of people. The result is that every kind of inequality imaginable risks rising. The predictability of it is sickening. The consequences of it kill,” he specified in the report.

“Extreme inequality is a form of economic violence,” said the report, adding, policies and political decisions that perpetuate the wealth and power of a privileged few result in direct harm to the vast majority of ordinary people across the world and the planet itself.

As a result of the pandemic, the NGO said that millions of people would still be alive today if they had had a vaccine-but they were denied a chance as big pharmaceutical companies hold a monopoly on these technologies.

“The anti-COVID-19 vaccine is taking lives and is supercharging inequalities worldwide,” the report stated.

For Oxfam, overcoming extreme poverty requires “progressive taxation” and “public and free for all health systems.”

The NGO also recommends that governments must immediately waive intellectual property rules over COVID-19 vaccine technologies to allow more countries to produce safe and effective vaccines to usher at the end of the pandemic.