<p>Despite ongoing government intervention and support policies, the more vulnerable groups continue to be disproportionately impacted by the adverse conditions that arise from difficult times. It remains uncertain whether this extends to the middle-aged people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite public debate, scholarly research remains scarce in this area. Our aim is to explore whether and how the middle-aged people are the more vulnerable groups compared to the younger and older groups of people during the pandemic in terms of economic outcomes and overall well-being. We also examine whether different national interventions are equally effective in mitigating the inherent inequalities. We conducted an analysis using individual-level dataset from the Gallup World Poll, which was surveyed from April 2020 to June 2021. The sample contains responses from more than 100,000 individual across 100 countries. Multi-level regression model was used for the hypothesis testing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the middle-aged people experienced the most acute effects of the pandemic, leading to the lowest level of life satisfaction among this age group. Surprisingly, while public health support succeeds in mitigating the adverse effect of COVID-19 on middle-aged people, economic support widened the gap in well-being between the middle-aged and the other age groups. Public and government support policies should be designed to respond to a specific group, which is in this paper the middle-aged people. This paper addresses the current research gap in the literature on adversity. We also show that there is an inherent inequality towards the middle-aged groups that seemed less known to academics and practitioners.</p>