Coronavirus

Less than half (49 per cent) of the 2.1 billion COVID vaccine donations promised to poorer countries by G7 countries have been delivered, according to new figures published today by Oxfam and the People’s Vaccine Alliance.  

87 percent of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) COVID-19 loans are requiring developing countries that have been denied equal access to vaccines and are facing some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises to adopt tough, new austerity measures that will further exacerbate poverty and inequality.

The COVID-19 death toll has been four times higher in lower-income countries than in rich ones, according to a new report published today by Oxfam on behalf of the People’s Vaccine Alliance as the world marks two years since the World Health Organization declared the pandemic. 

“People have become complacent about COVID-19. Our global (health) funds are fast running out of money. Vaccine inequity is getting worse,” said former UK prime minister Gordon Brown today. 

The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day— during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty. 

More doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been delivered to the EU, the UK and the United States in the six-week run up to Christmas than African countries have received all year, new analysis from the People’s Vaccine Alliance reveals today.

In reaction to Pfizer’s announcement of voluntary licenses of its COVID-19 oral antiviral treatment Paxlovid to the Medicines Patent Pool, People’s Vaccine Alliance spokesperson and Oxfam America’s Senior Advocacy Advisor, Robbie Silverman, said: “Pfizer’s announcement to voluntarily licence the COVID treatment Paxlovid is welcome but is far from enough." 
 
 

New figures from the Peoples Vaccine Alliance reveal that the companies behind two of the most successful COVID vaccines – Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna – are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute. The figures based on the latest company reports are released as CEOs from pharmaceutical industry meet for the annual STAT summit —the equivalent of a ‘Big Pharma Davos’— from 16-18 November.

In response to the announcement that AstraZeneca is to move away from the non-profit model for COVID vaccines, Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s Health Policy Manager and spokesperson for the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said: “AstraZeneca is breaking its repeated and celebrated public promises of a non-profit vaccine for all countries for the duration of this pandemic and to never to make a profit in any low- and middle-income country from this publicly funded vaccine."
 

An international coalition of human rights law groups, public health experts, and civil society organisations is taking legal action against the US, UK, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland, on the grounds that these countries are in violation of international human rights law by failing to intervene on what has been an inequitable and racially discriminatory rollout of the vaccine and other COVID healthcare technologies.