In these two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ten richest men in the world have seen their assets double, 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 became poor as a result of the health emergency.
These are the data contained in the Oxfam report “The pandemic of inequality”, published on the occasion of the opening of the works of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which will all take place in virtual mode.
"Since the start 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 ", reads the document.
Only Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, recorded a "capital surplus" in the first 21 months of the pandemic of 81.5 billion dollars, the equivalent of the estimated cost of vaccination (two doses and booster) for the entire world population. .
According to the non-governmental organization, we can speak of a real "pandemic of inequalities" in which the central banks of the countries have intervened by pumping trillions to support the economy. "But most of these resources - said Gabriela Bucher, director of Oxfam International - ended up in the pockets of the billionaires who are riding the boom in the stock market".
Another relevant phenomenon is represented by the 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: the monopolies held by Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have made it possible to make profits "of a thousand dollars per second and create five new billionaires". At the same time, "less than 1% of their vaccines have reached the inhabitants of low-income countries".
