The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 13

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

This is a sample of the Munk Members-Only Podcast. The program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week's Munk Members Podcast focus on three stories in the news this week: the third wave of COVID-19 hits across the world –  was the latest round of lockdowns inevitable or were there decisions missed and made that now have April 2021 looking all too similar to April 2020?; Brazil is plunged into its latest political crisis as the pandemic ravages Latin America's once dominant economy – are populists like Bolsonaro on the way out as their mismanagement of COVID-19 crisis ushers in a new wave of political instability?; and Russian democracy campaigner Alexei Navalny health is rapidly deteriorating in prison – is there anything the West can do to help to nudge Russia away from Putinism and towards democracy? To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk Podcast listeners. I wanted to let you know about a new daily podcast from our friends at the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. Every weekday host Tamara Kandakar explores a story impacting Canadians through conversations with globe journalists, experts, and people at the heart of the news. The goal of the decibel is to provide listeners with a context to help them make better sense of the world around us. You can catch new episodes every weekday morning fresh in your podcast feed. Listen to the decibel from the Globe and Mail wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Monk Podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk Members Only Podcasts. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only

podcasts, go to our website, www.wmunkdebates.com and register for membership. Membership is free and it's available for you right now at www.w monk debates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our regular Monk members only podcast. This is our 30-minute program where we dive into the big issues and ideas in the news this last week, hopefully give you some new analysis, some new insights into what's happening in our world.

and as our guide, we're exceedingly fortunate to have Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs and internationally acclaimed scholar and author. Janice, a lot to talk about this week. It's been a busy one. It sure has, Richard. And it's also a long weekend. Maybe everybody could take some time and listen to this one in a relaxed mode.

Let's do that. We have to start, obviously, with the arrival of the third wave, not just here in Canada, but we're seeing this everywhere from India, Brazil, to Europe, governments, cracking down, locking down. I want to ask you, though, about the specific situation here in Canada, because I think it is analogous to a lot of these other jurisdictions, did we, Janice, have to end up in this place, in this situation, effectively, Groundhog Day, but a year later? boy, doesn't April 2021 feel like April 2020?

Was this inevitable or were there steps and decisions along the way that were made that has brought this situation about, especially for us here in Canada? You know, I hear there's despair in your voice, Richard. And I think you're frankly reflecting the despondency and a sense that, oh my God, here we are again. We are 13 months into this. We're no better off than we were. And there's been a lot of pain and suffering on the way. And here we are again.

And that is such a widespread feeling, frankly, among all of us. You know, in Ontario, we have been locked down longer in one way or another. Not harder, not harder, but longer than almost anywhere else. Did this have to happen? No. Of course, there were decision points along the way. But what are the two big ones that eventually will change the trajectory of the pandemic? There are just two. One is vaccines. The more people you get vaccinated and you have to get a lot of them vaccinated with two shots. The fewer places, the virus. has to find a pleasant home to flourish. And more important, not only to flourish, but to mutate and produce new variants, because it is these variants that explain why we're here today. So part of what makes this so hard, we were in a race between the vaccines and the variants

and the vaccines won this round, that's for sure. What does that tell us going forward? Pick up the speed, aggressively vaccinate, aggressively vaccinate, but also understand these variants are with us because we live in an open world. Yeah, we slam borders. Yes, we've closed our border with the United States. We have food deliveries every day across that border. We cannot seal ourselves off.

And, you know, we are dealing with a small number of countries, 10, probably around the world, that are in an aggressive rollout vaccine mode. The others are not. So we are going to get new variants. All good points. I guess what concerns me is that, I mean, let's forget the past. Mistakes were made. We were slow in procurement. We botched rapid testing.

We basically failed all the major tests. of COVID from, no laughing matter here, protecting long-term care facilities, failing to do that not once but twice. You were very involved in the rapid antigen testing. You know that story. It can be told later. But I guess I want to talk about the future. And what I'm worried about is I see a scenario here in Canada and Europe, the other countries

that are kind of behind the curve on vaccinations largely because of the procurement issues and the lack of domestic manufacturing, obviously in Canada, the biggest. issue. We've talked about that before. What worries me is we're starting to see real challenges in vaccinations of key populations, populations over 80, as we move away from the near state. It's easy to vaccinate your health care workers, your long-term care facilities. We're now seeing absence of vaccination at around 50 to 60 percent amongst those 80 and over in high-risk neighborhoods, the very neighborhoods in Canada, and I'm sure this is happening around the world, where people maybe don't have easy access because of socioeconomic reasons, to a computer,

to an Uber, to take them to the vaccination center, to all the family supports and other things that come with, frankly, people who are in more affluent neighborhoods who have much higher rates of vaccination. So I worry going forward that we're kind of fooling ourselves if we don't think that the condition that we're in now could last for months. We could see rolling lockdowns followed by brief moments of patio

dining outdoors only to have the whole thing locked down again because as you say with these higher R not numbers on these new variants we need really high levels of vaccination within the population 80, 90 percent

to affect actively stop the spread. Am I wrong about this? You put your finger right on it, Richard. You know, the statistics right here at home among people over 80 are really shocking. We have, and who knows the exact number, but certainly around 50,000 people over 80 who did not get their vaccine in the first way, because they're hard to reach. They could be living alone in an apartment building and don't have supports and can't figure out how to do it. And so getting to those people as well as, as you said, people who live in poor neighborhoods and don't have supports, how do you get to those people?

You know, sending a mobile vans isn't going to get to that person living alone who doesn't have a family to support them. And so they're so hard to reach. So here's the second quiver in our hour, which I am a broken reckon on, which is, rapid testing and screening. If we don't do that, we're going to be in your world, Roger, because a variant will pop up. So what will be part of our life is a very different approach to screening, very similar to going to the airport. Nobody complains about being screened as a passenger when they go through the airport.

We just do it. We're going to have that kind of regime with us for the next. I think two to three years. But Janice, where are the machines? I'm not seeing them. They're nowhere. And again, these are like if you look at COVID, whenever we have to summit some big logistical challenge, whether it's reaching that elderly person who's alone in an apartment or it's deploying a rapid antigen testing facility, I don't know, at scale at the Skydome, which is our large sporting venue here in Toronto.

we seem to really stumble. We lack. We fall over our shoelaces. And I just, I don't know if I can deal with this, Janice. I mean, am I looking at like months of fits and starts, of closing and opening, of surging cases, of ICU capacity? I mean, we are shutting down an economy here in Ontario, $800 billion, $14 million people because we've hit $420,000. 18 ICU beds with COVID patients in it. That is an excruciating choke point, a very narrow choke point, Janice, which to me,

I'm sorry to be pessimistic on April, you know, Easter, where we're supposed to think about renewal in the future, but that choke point is so narrow, Janice, it really worries me about the future and our ability to handle these variants, the surging, the lack of vaccination, immunization, testing, you name it. I think we're going to be in this mess for months. We are. I know this we are talking about months. We are certainly talking.

I think we're in this until early, at the most optimistic, early 2020. But let's, well, okay. But let's talk about the choke points. There are two. So you're right that we have not scaled. and we're beginning to do it though. So one of the very large companies in this country just shut down an outbreak

in one of their large flats with rapid antigen screens. So we have proof, you know, we have proof of concept now this works. What's the real problem? Not even price. Because those screys are now going down to $5.00 in tests.

And you can do them at home, Roger. You know, when you get up in the morning, you brush your teeth. There's going to be a little thing there. But that sounds, Janice, that sounds like science fiction right now. That sounds like... It's not. It's not.

You're saying by Christmas, I'm going to have a rapid antigen testing machine beside my toothbrush? Yes, you are. And why am I saying this? Because the demand in the marketplace is finally beginning to grow. So you know, this is not complicated technology. The tests are out there. They're already being used. If the demand builds, I have enough confidence in the manufacturing.

in North America, that people will begin to manufacture at scale, which is really what we need and drive the price down. And so I'm very confident that the market will supply these tests right across North America. I can tell you that there are already large universities, especially in the United States, that are all over this for their fall. Oh, yeah, no, I've read about it. I'm envious, but here in Canada, it's coming. It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. Let me talk about the other. And then we have to live with months, months, Janice, where you have a big, complicated economy like Ontario, that you're closing down when you hit 428 ICU beds. I mean, that is an incredibly low threshold.

Like the lack of resiliency within the system to respond to these variants, to respond to the slow rates of vaccination, the lack of uptake amongst these elderly and vulnerable populations. Yes, antigen testing great, but that's months from now. And instead, you know, we're dealing with a situation here, which I think is going to be Groundhog Day for, unfortunately, months to come. Am I wrong? Let's talk just quickly about that choke point that you've mentioned, because that is what's driving the lockdown. Only one thing is, I think it's very important for people to understand.

One thing is driving the lockdown. I see you bits, right? So growing the number of beds, not a problem. There is a COVID hospital now up and running in northern Toronto. What's the problem, registered, nurses and doctors to staff the beds. So it's not a physical plant problem. It's a human resource problem. Again, there are so much.

We had a year, Janice. We had a year. We knew right back April 2020 that ICU capacity, including staffing and other issues would be an ongoing need. And here we are a year later, shutting down a province of 14 million people because we've hit sub 500 ICU bed capacity with COVID patients. That seems insane. So what do we need to do here? We need to bring in the talent that we need in this country to grow the number of people who are qualified to staff beds. And what stands in the way of that. And this has been, frankly, a problem, much more generic problem. Regulators do their

job, which is assure standards. And the problem they're trying to solve for all the time is, oh my God, a product that's not a product that has unanticipated consequences or a person who's not qualified enough. In an emergency, in a national emergency, that's not the problem you're trying to solve for. You are trying to solve for choke points. If I had to point to one thing that explains why we are yet again locked out. It is that attitude. And we need to be honest with the public at say, we are in emergency mode here. We're going to do things that we would never do. This is not business as usual. But our governments don't talk that way.

Our regulators don't talk that way. And our manufacturers don't talk that way. No. That's the issue. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www.w monkdebates.com. Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode.

and all of our monk members' podcasts. Thanks for listening.