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Business Daily

Billionaires and the Pandemic

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4816 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Some of the world’s richest people have been digging deep during the pandemic, donating their own money to help fight Covid-19. With some of the wealthiest 1% already funding medical research, we ask how comfortable we should be with billionaires taking on an even bigger role in public health. Vivienne Nunis speaks to David Callahan, editor of the website Inside Philanthropy and Rob Reich, Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University. Chris Anderson, the head of the ideas-sharing platform, TED, tells us philanthropy needs a shake-up. And, neuroscientist Dr. Christof Koch explains what it’s like to work at a medical research institute funded by private money. (Picture: a charity savings jar. Credit: Getty)

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Business Daily with me Vivian Nunes.

0:05.1

Coming up, billionaires fighting the coronavirus.

0:09.0

We'll hear how some of the world's richest people are digging deep during the pandemic.

0:14.8

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, there have been some big names here,

0:19.3

but there's a lot of billionaires that

0:21.5

haven't made any significant gifts. Should people give just because they're rich? And who decides

0:27.8

what the money is spent on? How comfortable should we be with billionaires already funding medical

0:34.0

research, taking on an even bigger role in global public health.

0:38.8

We don't want to leave ourselves in a position of newfound dependence upon philanthropists

0:43.9

to do things that we think we ought to be doing collectively.

0:47.7

That's all coming up here on Business Daily from the BBC.

0:52.9

The coronavirus pandemic is not only deadly, it's expensive.

0:57.7

Governments around the world have shelled out trillions

1:00.0

to deal with the health emergency brought on by COVID-19

1:03.3

and the economic crisis caused by trying to contain it.

1:07.4

But there are shortfalls, not enough protective gear for health staff, too few ICU units,

1:14.1

and millions of unemployed people struggling to buy food. So if central banks and governments are

1:19.5

finding it hard to manage this crisis, what help is there? Step forward, the billionaires. Well,

1:25.3

some of them. The billionaires of the world are sitting on trillions of dollars.

1:31.5

Just in the United States alone, the 700 or so billionaires in this country,

1:37.1

before the market crashed, had about $3 trillion in assets.

1:42.1

So if anybody has a little extra change sitting around to help

...

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