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Billionaires blast into space as billions suffer on planet Earth

In response to Jeff Bezos’ space flight scheduled for Wednesday NZ time, Deepak Xavier, Oxfam International’s Global Head of Inequality Campaign, said: 

“We’ve now reached stratospheric inequality. Billionaires burning into space, away from a world of pandemic, climate change and starvation. 11 people are likely now dying of hunger each minute while Bezos prepares for an 11-minute personal space flight. This is human folly, not human achievement.

“The ultra-rich are being propped up by unfair tax systems and pitiful labor protections. US billionaires got around $1.8 trillion richer since the beginning of the pandemic and nine new billionaires were created by Big Pharma’s monopoly on the COVID-19 vaccines. Bezos pays next to no US income tax but can spend $7.5 billion on his own aerospace adventure. Bezos’ fortune has almost doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic. He could afford to pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and still be richer than he was when the pandemic began. 

“Billionaires should pay their fair share of taxes for our hospitals, schools, roads and social care, too. Governments must adopt a much stronger global minimum tax on multinational corporations and look at new revenues. A wealth tax, for example of just 3 percent, would generate $6 billion a year from Bezos’ $200 billion fortune alone ―a sixth of what the US spends on foreign aid. A COVID-19 profits tax on Amazon would yield $11 billion, enough to vaccinate nearly 600 million people. 

“What we need is a fair tax system that allows more investment into ending hunger and poverty, into education and healthcare, and into saving the planet from the growing climate crisis ―rather than leaving it.”

Notes:

Oxfam recently reported that global food prices have risen by 40 percent in the past year, which has contributed to 20 million more people having fallen into catastrophic conditions of hunger and a six-fold increase in famine-like conditions. Download Oxfam’s report: “The Hunger Virus Multiplies.”

Oxfam is calling for a response to the ongoing crisis that prioritises support for workers and small businesses. It includes establishing a COVID-19 pandemic profits tax to ensure shared sacrifice, and the redeployment of resources away from those cashing in on the pandemic and toward those bearing the burden. For more information, download Oxfam’s report: “Power, Profits and the Pandemic: From corporate extraction for the few to an economy that works for all”.

Jeff Bezos’ net wealth has increased from $113 billion (Forbes’ Annual World’s Billionaires List, March 2020) to $207.9 billion (Forbes’ Real Time Billionaire List, 16 July 2021). The cost of vaccinating the world’s adult population was calculated as follows: two doses at $7 per dose for 5 billion people, for a total of $70 billion. This is based on the average cost per dose. Oxfam does not endorse such high prices for vaccines and, as part of The People’s Vaccine Alliance, is campaigning for patent-free access to allow generic manufacturers to produce COVID-19 vaccines to drive down prices.

Millions facing double disaster as second Covid wave overwhelms rural India

New Delhi: The second wave has left public healthcare in shambles. People have lost their lives due to lack of proper medical facilities and infrastructure. The situation is getting a little under control in the cities, but it is still very grim in rural India where there are issues related to access to medical facilities, hospitals, doctors, technically trained staff or testing facilities.

Around 65% of the total population of approximately 1.3 billion live in rural India, which hardly has rural health infrastructure. As per the Rural Health Statistics 2019, there is a shortfall of 43,736 Sub Centres (23 percent), 8764 Primary Health Centres/PHC (28 percent) and 2865 Community Health Centres/CHC (37 percent) across the country.

Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said: “There was a time when we woke up every day to news of death of a friend, family, acquaintance. Villages were worse off – with no access to health care, no testing; in some cases, 20-25 people from a village died within a few days. No one in India has remained untouched by this pandemic. And most of these lives could have been saved if there was proper, adequate, and affordable healthcare for all.”

People outside the major cities do not have the same access to social media to reach out for help or raise awareness of what is happening. Lack of testing, healthcare facilities and postmortems mean large number of cases in rural communities are not being recorded.

Apart from a healthcare calamity, India was already reeling under economic stress. The sporadic lockdowns and containment zones mean that once again it is the informal sector workers who are going to be worst hit. Latest report from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) states that over 1 crore Indians lot their jobs in the second Covid wave and around 97% household incomes have fallen since the start of the pandemic last year.

Millions who slipped into poverty last year due to job losses are now facing another looming crisis: hunger. India already has the largest population facing food shortages in the world, with an estimated 189 million people in India already undernourished before the pandemic began

While healthcare is the primary focus at this point in time, Oxfam India is also reaching out to some of the most marginalised and vulnerable communities with food. In the long run we will work towards providing livelihood support to informal sector workers and their families.

Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said: “We are reaching out to public healthcare institutions, district administrations and COVID Care Centres with medical equipment such as oxygen concentrators, patient monitoring systems, oximeters, oxygen nasal masks, and thermometers along with PPE kits and safety kits for frontline health workers. We will also reach the most marginalised and vulnerable communities with food, ration, and safety kits.”

Through Mission Sanjeevani, our COVID-19 response in the second wave, we have provided 96 Oxygen Concentrators, 155 Oxygen Cylinders (40 Lts), over 1200 Oxygen Nasal Masks, 12 BiPAP machines, over 5000 diagnostic tools/equipment of various types, 1630 PPE kits, 90 ICU beds, community safety kits and one month’s dry ration supply to 15,500 people so far.

In addition to this, Oxfam India plans to strengthen the rural health ecosystem, in some of the most marginalised and vulnerable communities, by providing the necessary tools, training and inexpensive equipment needed by frontline health workers like Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) for early identification of cases and timely referral to health centres, and hiring doctors, staff nurses and paramedics, wherever possible.

In the first month of our response to the second wave, we have provided support in Maharashtra, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh. While continuing to work in these states among the most marginalised and vulnerable communities, Oxfam India will also look at expanding to Bihar, Odisha, Assam, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Gujarat.

Notes to the Editors:

  1. In the second wave, Oxfam India is working with the government and local administrations to deploy 7 Oxygen generation plants, 25 ventilators, 500 Oxygen concentrators, 3000 Oxygen cylinders (40-lts capacity), 11800 Oxygen nasal masks, 300 BiPAP machines, 1200 ICU beds, around 16000 diagnostic equipment of different types, and 19000 PPE kits. We are also aiming to provide one-month dry ration supply and community safety kits to 225,000 people.
  2. Oxfam India also plans to train 35000 ASHA workers and provide them with medical kits for a larger community outreach to ensure Covid appropriate behaviour and also tackle the issue of vaccine hesitancy.
  3. Since March 2020, Oxfam India has been working in 16 states, reaching the most marginalised and vulnerable with medical supplies, food kits, cooked meals, safety and PPE kits, cash, and livelihood trainings.

For more information, please contact:
David Bull
Oxfam Aotearoa
[email protected]

About Oxfam India

Oxfam India is a movement of people working to create a just and an equal India. We work to ensure that Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims, and women and girls have safe-violence free lives with freedom to speak their mind, equal opportunities to realise their rights, and a discrimination free future.

During the last five years, Oxfam India has responded to more than 35 humanitarian disasters across the country and directly provided relief to nearly 1.5 million people. Oxfam India’s humanitarian response is guided by the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalised communities in disaster affected areas.

Oxfam reaction to 2021 Global Health Summit

Anna Marriott, Oxfam Health Policy Manager and Policy co-lead for the People’s Vaccine Alliance said: 

The 2021 Global Health Summit ended today in danger of being judged an historical failure of global solidarity to tackle a Covid-19 pandemic that is still, around the world, in its first expanding phase and yet to peak. World leaders talked eloquently about the bottle-necks that are limiting vaccine manufacturing and supply, and the gross inequalities today of global vaccinations, but their solutions remain the same tired ones that have failed billions of people who remain unvaccinated and vulnerable to infection ahead. 

Nine people are dying every minute while the vaccine stores of COVAX – a multilateral initiative to get vaccines to developing countries – lie empty. Rich nations again parroted the lines of the same pharmaceutical companies who’ve succeeded better in creating new vaccine billionaires among their CEOs and major shareholders than they have supplying enough stock. The trickle of charity promised at the summit today was the sound of a bucket of water being thrown on a forest fire. 

Governments representing the vast majority of the world’s people are calling for an end to the corporate vaccine monopolies and demanding the mandatory sharing of the rights in order to produce more doses. But a handful of rich countries are continuing to put their relationships with big pharma ahead of ending this pandemic. Pharmaceutical corporations have had more than a year to voluntarily share their intellectual property and know-how but have instead put profits before people at every turn. Relying on just a handful of pharmaceutical corporations to make enough vaccines – and the sharing of crumbs of that supply to developing countries as charity – is an insult to the nurses and doctors on the front lines trying to save lives now. 

G20 leaders have once again ceded control of this pandemic to a handful of pharmaceutical corporations who continue to dictate who will get a vaccine and live, and those who will not and may die as a result.

Vaccinating poorest half of humanity against coronavirus could cost less than four month’s big pharma profits – Oxfam

Vaccinating the poorest half of humanity – 3.7 billion people – against coronavirus could cost less than the ten biggest pharmaceutical companies make in four months, Oxfam said today.

The agency is urging governments and pharmaceutical companies to guarantee that vaccines, tests, and treatments will be patent-free and equitably distributed to all nations and people, ahead of the World Health Assembly next week. The virtual meeting on Monday 18 May will be attended by health ministers from 194 countries.

The Gates Foundation has estimated that the cost of procuring and delivering a safe and effective vaccine to the world’s poorest people is $25 billion. Last year the top ten pharmaceutical companies made $89 billion in profits – an average of just under $30 billion every four months.

Oxfam warned that rich countries and huge pharmaceutical companies – driven by national or private interests – could prevent or delay the vaccine from reaching vulnerable people, especially those living in developing countries.

The EU has proposed the voluntary pooling of patents for coronavirus vaccines, treatments, and tests in their draft resolution for the World Health Assembly. If made mandatory and worldwide, this would ensure that all countries could produce, or import low cost versions, of any available vaccines, treatments, and tests. However, leaked documents reveal that the Trump administration is trying to delete references to pooled patents and insert strong language on respecting the patents of the pharmaceutical industry. This would give pharmaceutical companies exclusive rights to produce, and set prices for, any vaccines, treatments and tests they develop – even if taxpayer money has been used to fund their research and development.

Jose Maria Vera, Oxfam International Interim Executive Director said:

“Providing a vaccine to 3.7 billion people could cost less than what the ten biggest pharmaceutical companies make in four months. Anything less than guaranteeing that a vaccine is made available free of charge to all people would be obscene.

“Vaccines, tests and treatments should be distributed according to need, not auctioned off to the highest bidder. We need safe, patent-free vaccines, treatments and tests that can be mass produced worldwide, and a clear and fair plan for how they will be distributed.”

Once vaccines or treatments are developed, there is also a high risk that rich and powerful governments will outbid poorer nations and force their way to the front of the queue, as they did in the scramble for other essential medical supplies such as personal protective equipment and oxygen.

In March, drug manufacturer Gilead moved to extend the monopoly on a potential treatment for the virus, and only withdrew it after a public outcry. Gilead has now donated a significant portion of its current supply of remdesivir to the US government, but news reports suggest the company could make significant profits from subsequent production. Some Wall Street analysts expect Gilead to charge more than $4,000 per patient for the drug, even though the cost of remdesivir can be as low as $9 per patient.

Many poor countries are unable to access essential vaccines and medicines due to patent rules which give pharmaceutical companies monopoly rights and the power to set prices well above what they can afford. Pneumonia is the biggest killer of children under the age of five, with 2,000 children dying every day. For over a decade, millions of children have not had access to patented pneumonia vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline due to its high cost. After years of campaigning by Médecins San Frontieres, both companies reduced their prices in 2016, but only for the very poorest countries, leaving millions of children still without access to their vaccine.

 

Oxfam is proposing a four-point global plan that calls for:

1.  Mandatory sharing of all Covid-19 related knowledge, data and intellectual property, and a commitment to make all public funding conditional on treatments or vaccines being made patent-free and accessible to all.

2. A commitment to deliver additional global vaccine manufacturing and distribution capacity with funding from rich country governments. This means building factories in countries willing to share and investing now in the millions of additional health workers needed to deliver prevention, treatment, and care both now and in the future.

3. A globally agreed, equitable distribution plan with a locked-in fairness formula so that supply is based on need, not ability to pay. Vaccines, treatments, and tests should be produced and supplied at the lowest cost possible to governments and agencies, ideally no more than $2 a dose for a vaccine, and provided free at the point of delivery to everyone that needs it.

4. A commitment to fix the broken system for the research and development of new medicines. The current system puts pharmaceutical profit above the health of people across the world meaning many needed put unprofitable medicines never get developed, and those that do are too often priced out of reach for the poorest countries and people.

Vera concluded “Delivering an affordable vaccine for everyone will require unprecedented global cooperation. Governments must rip up the rulebook and prioritise the health of people everywhere, over the patents and profits of pharmaceutical corporations. Governments must ensure that no one is left behind.”

Notes to editor

A background briefing paper is available on request

The Gates Foundation estimated the cost of producing and distributing a vaccine and have confirmed that this cost relates to the production and distribution in low and lower middle income countries only.

The 2019 profits for the top ten pharmaceutical companies can be found here

The Gilead monopoly decision can be found here, future Gilead cost of remdesivir here and remdesivir potential cost per patient here

Oxfam believes that vaccines should ideally be produced and supplied for no more than $2 per dose. This is a reasonable challenge to set given that new complex vaccines for big killers like pneumonia are already available for this price.