Oxfam report: 10 Billionaires Made Enough Money During The Pandemic To Vaccinate The Entire World

By Dilip -

The coronavirus recession is over, if you ask the billionaires of the world. According to a report released Monday by Oxfam, the top 1,000 billionaires collectively lost about 30% of their wealth when COVID-19 restrictions stalled global economies in March. By the end of November, they’d made it all back. For the world’s richest, it took less than 10 months to recover the financial losses caused by the pandemic. For the world’s poorest, the report estimated, it will take more than 10 years. 

“While a wealthy minority have amassed vast fortunes before and during the pandemic, the majority of the world’s population have been struggling to survive on poverty wages and without access to decent health care or education,” Paul O’Brien, vice president of Oxfam America, told HuffPost. “Today’s levels of extreme wealth concentration are not sustainable. Billionaires are a sign of economic sickness, not health. They are the symptom of a broken economy.”

The pandemic threatens to undo the progress of more than two decades of declining global poverty. The World Bank has estimated that more than 200 million people may sink into poverty as a result of COVID-19’s economic effects — in low-income countries and in rich ones, including the United States. Startlingly, the Oxfam report found that the cost to prevent people from falling into a life lived on less than $5.50 a day would be far less than the profits made by the world’s wealthiest during the coronavirus crisis…



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