China’s richest man Jack Ma donates £11m to help tackle Coronavirus

China’s richest man, Jack Ma, has donated 100 million yuan (£11 million) to help towards defeating the coronavirus disease, that has rampaged much of China, with close to 170 people already dead and over 7700 already infected.

Jack Ma, who is worth £32.9 billion, owns E-commerce giants, Alibaba, and has donated the money to scientists across the world who are working towards creating a vaccine for the coronavirus while £4.4 million of the money will go to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Jack Ma announced the donation on Thursday on social media platform, Weibo, stating:

‘The Jack Ma Foundation will exhaust our abilities to provide more help to the development and growth of medical science.’

Ma’s foundation said it had it has donated 100 million yuan to “support the development of a coronavirus vaccine.”

“We know that the battle between humanity and disease is a long journey. This money will help various medical research efforts and help disease prevention,” it added.

Coronaviruses are a family of diseases which include the common cold and the virus which caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which originated in China in 2002 and killed nearly 800 people around the world.

It causes flu-like symptoms and can make it hard for people to breathe, with a lot of people worldwide now dead after contracting the illness.

The World Health Organisation (WH0) emergency committee is expected to declare Coronavirus an international public health emergency any time from now.