The pandemic is giving birth to millions and killing the poor Coronavirus pandemic

As we enter the third year of this cruel pandemic, in the midst of its turmoil, we are still tempted to re-imagine our world.

When the first pandemic struck, the rich and the poor were united in fear. Powerful politicians condemned nationalist selfishness, reprimanded companies for behaving as “stingy as stingy” and promised that a vaccine would be a public good.

He felt that there was solidarity. But only in the beginning.

As we mourn the death toll from the virus – more than 5.5 million deaths have been officially reported, but the actual death toll from the pandemic is estimated to have lost more than 19 million lives – we see that greed has been busy.

We will enter 2022, witnessing the largest increase in millionaire wealth since records began. In this pandemic, a million was created every 26 hours. The wealth of the 10 richest men in the world has doubled, growing at a rate of $ 15,000 per second. But COVID-19 has left 99 percent of humanity worse off.

Our evil is difference. Income equality is a stronger indicator of age than whether you will die as a result of COVID-19. In 2021, millions of people died in poor countries with poor access to vaccines when pharmaceutical monopolies backed by rich countries cut their supply. We created millions of new vaccines to deny access to vaccines to billions of people.

Because inequality hurts us all, it puts us all in danger because of the inevitable variants of man-made vaccine apartheid. In the same way, we all lose the power of the elites in our democracy and the climate crisis driven by the excessive consumption of the top 1 percent, which are responsible for double the emissions of the bottom 50 percent.

This is no longer rich versus poor: super-rich versus all of us.

Oxfam’s new estimates show that the difference kills at least four people every four seconds. And that is a conservative figure. This economic violence is not in spite of extreme wealth, but because of it.

It would be tempting to just see all of this as the usual business-going rich-well-being. But these data were collected and calculated in Oxfam’s new paper. “It kills differences”Are out of the list. The wealth of a million, for example, has risen more since the pandemic began than in the previous 14 years. The IMF, the World Bank, Crédit Suisse and the World Economic Forum (WEF) predict a rise in inequality across countries.

The super-rich are going through a big pandemic. Central banks have spent much of the $ 1 trillion on financial markets to save the economy in the pockets of the stock market boom, the rise of monopoly power, privatization, the erosion of workers’ rights and the pace of wealth and corporate taxation and labor market liberalization.

At the same time, billions of people are facing the impact of increasing inequality. In some countries, the poorest people are nearly four times as likely to die as a result of COVID-19. About 3.4 million black Americans would survive today if their life expectancy was the same as that of white Americans, which was already shocking by the 2.1 million pre-pandemic. Gender parity is being pushed back a generation, and in many countries women are facing a second pandemic that exacerbates gender-based violence.

Vaccines apartheid feed all the differences. And now the NDF-sponsored austerity option in more than 80 countries threatens to make things much worse.

We are making history for all the wrong reasons. Difference XX. it is as great as the peak of Western imperialism in the early twentieth century. The Golden Age of the end of the 20th century has passed.

The definition of insanity is the hope that change can come from the failed and narrow-mindedness of neoliberalism. The unprecedented nature of the current crisis calls for an extraordinary systemic action and a change in the political imagination of the possible.

Each government has XXI. it needs a 21st century plan to achieve greater economic equality and address gender and racial inequality. That is what social movements demand. This is the lesson of progressive governments after the Second World War and the wave of liberation from colonialism.

We can start redirecting billions of dollars to the real economy to save lives. It is feasible and necessary for governments to immediately begin to recover the huge profits made by the super-rich during the pandemic, through one-off solidarity taxes, following the example of countries like Argentina.

That’s a start. To address the more basic level of inequality of wealth, we need sustainable progressive taxes on capital and wealth. History provides inspiration: US President Franklin D Roosevelt set a marginal income rate of 94% after World War II (until 1981, that rate averaged 81 percent).

Government revenues from progressive taxation can be invested in proven and powerful means of creating a more equal, healthier and freer society, such as universal health care – as Costa Rica has done – and universal social protection. No one should have to pay a health user fee again. We can invest in ending gender-based violence and creating a world free of fossil fuels. Imagine the lives saved, the opportunities created.

But redistribution alone is not enough. We need to change the rules of the market, the private sector and globalization so that they do not create such a big difference in the first place. This means changing power: strengthening and protecting workers’ rights; the elimination of sexist laws that prevent nearly 3,000 billion women from having equal employment opportunities with men; and confronting monopolies that threaten democracy.

At the moment, the most urgent task is for the rich governments to break the pharmaceutical monopolies on COVID-19 vaccines in order to spread the vaccines to the world and end this pandemic.

It is up to us to figure out how to get out of this global emergency. The same could be true: the violent economy, in which billionaire wealth is rising, is dominated by an increasingly deadly inequality that defeats itself and defeats itself.

Or, if we demand it, there could be profound changes: economies based on equality, in which no one lives in poverty, or in a billion-dollar wealth unimaginable, in which inequality no longer kills … hope prevails.

It is in our hands.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.