 During the COVID-19 pandemic, corporations in the food, pharmaceutical, energy and technology sectors have profited handsomely. Meanwhile, due to the pandemic's ongoing effects and quickly rising costs of essentials such as food and electricity, millions of people around the world are facing a cost of living crisis. Inequality, which was already high before COVID-19, has now reached new heights. According to a new Oxfam brief released on May 23, for every new billionaire minted during the pandemic, which is one every 30 hours, over a million people might be pushed into extreme poverty in 2022 at approximately the same rate. The brief, profiting from pain, was published while the World Economic Forum in Davos takes place for the first time face-to-face since COVID-19. According to the brief, the pandemic created 573 billionaires at the rate of one every 30 hours. It is estimated that at a rate of a million people every 33 hours, 263 million more people will fall into extreme poverty in 2022 alone. According to Gabriella Butcher, Executive Director of Oxfam International, billionaires are arriving in Davos to celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes. Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive, she added. Billionaires' wealth has increased more in the first three years of COVID-19 than in the previous 23 years. Their combined wealth now accounts for 13.9% of global GDP, which is a three-fold increase from the year 2000 when it was 4.4%. The study also finds that business monopoly holders in the energy, food and pharmaceutical sectors are making record profits despite the decade-high prices in the face of COVID-19. In the last two years, the fortunes of food and energy billionaires have increased by $453 billion or $1 million every two days. Five of the world's major energy companies, that is BP, Shell, Total Energies, Exxon and Chevron, are producing $2,600 in profits every second, while 62 new food millionaires have emerged. The Kargil family controls 70% of the global agricultural market with just three other corporations. Kargil generated its largest profit in corporate history last year, which was $5 billion in net income. It is anticipated to do so again in 2022. There are now 12 billionaires in the Kargil family up from 8 before the pandemic. Global food costs have reached new highs, causing social and political instability. 60% of low-income countries are on the verge of defaulting on their debt. People in developing countries spend more than twice as much of their income on food than people in developed countries. The epidemic has resulted in the creation of 40 new pharmaceutical millionaires. Pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna and Pfizer are earning profits of $1,000 every second from the monopoly control of the COVID-19 vaccine. This is despite billions of dollars in public funding for its research. Governments are being charged up to 24 times the potential cost of generic manufacture. In low-income countries, 87% of people have not been properly immunized. The brief has also suggested some actions that the government must take urgently, which are, introduce one-off solidarity taxes on billionaires' pandemic windfalls to fund support for people facing rising food and energy costs, and a fair and sustainable recovery from COVID-19. Argentina enacted a one-time special levy known as the Millionaires Tax and is now considering enacting a windfall tax on energy gains as well as a tax on undeclared assets held abroad to pay off IMF debt. Nearly $8 trillion has been stored in tax havens by the super-rich. End crisis profiteering by introducing a temporary excess profit tax of 90% to capture the windfall profits of big corporations across all industries. According to Oxfam, a tax on just 32 highly profitable multinational corporations could have raised $104 billion in revenue in 2020. Introduce permanent wealth taxes to reign in extreme wealth and monopoly power as well as the outsized carbon emissions of the super-rich. A 2% annual wealth tax on millionaires and 5% on billionaires could raise $2.52 trillion annually. This amount is enough to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty, produce enough vaccines for the entire world, and provide universal healthcare and social protection to everyone in low and lower middle-income countries.