The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 15

Episode Date: April 16, 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 edition of the Munk Member's Only Podcast explore three big issues in the news this week: The third wave of COVID-19 variants accelerates Canada's public health crisis with hospitalizations soaring 30% in seven days while provinces experience new delays of the Moderna vaccine and subject their publics to vaccine rollouts plagued with delays, unused doses and confused messaging – Can Canada get its pandemic strategy back on track or is too late to blunt the full effect of the third wave?;  Biden expels diplomats and puts new tough sanctions on Russia – What is the strategy behind these new measures? How is Vladimir Putin likely to react? Is war in Ukraine more or less likely as a result?; and the value of Canada's housing stock rises an astronomical 30% in value in one year – Are we inside a dangerous housing bubble? What can government do to curb the risk runaway housing prices present financial system and social equity? We discuss it all.   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. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.munkdebates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, chair and moderator of the Monk Debates. debates and the monk dialogues. It's time for our weekly monk members only podcast. This is where we dig into the big issues and ideas shaping our world that are in the news, hopefully provide you over the next half hour with some new insights and analysis that you can take away and use to kind of

think through. Where do we go from here? And what a week it's been? Our guest, as usual, is Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs and acclaimed scholar, author and someone that every week I enjoy talking to precisely because she's able to provide that kind of next level of analysis on these big challenges that we face. And Janice, quite a week. Let's get right into it. But first, say hello to the monk members. So good to be with you, Rudyard, and with all the monk members in a really, really difficult week.

Yeah. I think our audience really enjoyed our discussion last week, Janice, where we talked a little bit about our different kind of emotions facing this third wave. I described mine as bleak. You refuse to be bleak. You evoked a kind of constructive anger. I'm wondering where, how you're feeling seven days later, because this has been a tough, tough week. Hospitalizations up 30% across the country. in a week cases up a similar amount in seven days. Schools now in many provinces closed indefinitely. And it looks like a new set of even harsher restrictions are coming and coming soon. Janice, are you ready to join me in bleak this week? No, I absolutely am not going to join you in bleak. But I would say, Redyard, this is the toughest week. Canadians have endured in living memory, frankly, because most people do not remember World War II.

And even for Canadians, we were, even though we had our family members fighting abroad, we were sheltered by the ocean. But it's going to get tougher than it is this week. And so we need grit and endurance. some optimism to get through what's in front of us. You know, just again, to personalize this a bit, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners in the same boat, you know, I look back over the last 13 months, you know, a business that I really like that I took a lot of professional and personal satisfaction from has now been closed for over a year.

You know, my schools for my kids have been shuttered three times now indefinitely. We have no idea when our kids' school is coming back. Our, my family like yours, I'm sure, is now isolated. We've been apart for far too long as a family. And I'm 50 years of age. And, Janice, I have no idea when I'm going to be vaccinated, what I'm going to be vaccinated with. You know, I want to have grit. I want to have plucked, Janice.

But, you know, it's tough. It really is tough right now to be hopeful in the face of what seems like a situation that just has no end. We were 13 months into this and on all the major facets and features of my life, from my children to my family, to my business, to my personal health, I am no better off than I was a year ago. I get that, but there is an old saying, Richard, it gets darkest just before you see some light at the end of the tunnel. And that's the paradox of where Canadians are right now. So let me paint a picture of, and this is really the question you're asking, how do we get out of this?

We have not been able to do it thus far. So we are in for a very tough six to eight weeks, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. But while we are going through that period, vaccinations are continuing in this country, and we should get more supply. And it is entirely conceivable that every adult that is willing to get vaccinated, will be vaccinated with two shocks, hopefully, by the end of September.

And we have examples of countries that have very high rates of illness and hospitalization who get vaccinated, and we see dramatic drops too, where we have clinical evidence now in front of us that it does work if you do two things. And that's Israel, where the economy is now fully reopened, And cases have dropped by 93%, 93% cases fewer now in that country than there were before the vaccination wall that's started. And, of course, the other bigger one that has been dealing with the British variant is Britain. And life pubs are reopening in Britain. So that's what I'm saying.

We need to look out. But, Janice, I agree. Just to interject here, you know, kudos, fantastic for the UK and Israel. I'm not in the UK and Israel. I'm in downtown Toronto and I feel like my government has failed me. We could have made decisions. We could have made choices. We could have done things months ago to create a situation which would have maybe not been exactly like Israel, the UK, but sure wouldn't be like what we're facing now, which you're right, is going to be a very dark six to eight to 12 or more weeks.

We didn't make those choices. We didn't make those decisions. So now all of us have to endure this. We have to acknowledge Janice. that's what's going to happen now, the deaths that are going to happen, is not the result of, you know, fate. None of this is inevitable. We backed ourselves and more importantly, our governments backed ourselves, our society into this horrible situation through our incompetence, through botched decisions, through faulty policies, through missed opportunities. You know, you are right about that. Let's just, let me just agree with you.

You are right about that. And your anger is justified. But let's talk about three areas, Roger, where we could do much better than we're doing right now. One is and then let's see who else is struggling in the same way we are. One is the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been halted through most of Europe, right? And the global cell is dependent on really two vaccines,

AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson. Leave aside for a minute the Russian and the Chinese vaccine because we have no data on how good or how bad that Chinese vaccine is. And we've stopped them. Now, why have we stopped them? We've stopped them because the research community was honest with us and told us the truth. There are very, very rare cases of cerebral blood clots to use English.

But what are the data? about 40 people, roughly 30 million doses got blood clots. Here's what this really looks like. If you get COVID-19, there is a chance. There is a 10-fold chance. That's the best way for me to put this. 10 times more likely get a blood clot if you have COVID than if you're vaccinated. Okay.

let's take the vaccine with the highest risk of blood clotting now. AstraZeneca, a factor of five out of a million. What's the record for Pfizer? Four blood clots. Now, the drugstore around the corner for me has thousands, thousands, a chain of AstraZeneca. And you could get one right now, Roger, and so could your wife, except the government has stopped at all for people over 55.

Put those numbers out and give people a choice whether they want to take the risk of getting COVID in a terrible environment right now and have 10 times the risk of a blood clot or take AstraZeneca monitor. And by the way, even if you get a blood clot, we know how to treat you for it. That is just wrong. What do you think, Janice, we're going to see, though, in the coming weeks because we're let's say tick ontario here for our international listeners

is you know a population of 14 million we're looking at projections now uh probably in the low side of four to six weeks of 16,000 cases possibly up to 18,000 a day we already have a hospital because of historically low ICU capacity that is now maxed we will be triaging patients in a matter of the next week to 10 days what do we what do we do we do for here jennis? Is it time for, as painful as this would be, is it time for a really strict shutdown? I mean a shutdown like we have frankly not done in Canada, a shutdown like they had in Melbourne or in parts of Europe where, you know, you leave your house on one day a week, according to, I don't know, a number on your driver's license or your passport to shop and the rest of the time you are in your house. is that where this is inevitably headed? Well, I'm going to change what you just said, Richard,

because what we're dealing with here is human behavior, okay? And we need to understand what is reasonably safe still and what is Nazi. So we should close all businesses now, except those that are engaged in truly essential services. Food, okay? Nobody can stay home if they're not food. deliveries, pharmaceuticals, you know, and we need truck drivers because we import our food in this country. But we really have to cut the opportunity for people to gather inside, except for things

they really need, which means food and pharmacy. That's it. But what's really dumb, and excuse my English, is to really dumb in a country like Canada is to restrict people from going to a park or going for a walk. Or the idea of a curfew is frankly just stupid. It's a signal for behavior. It has no public health benefits. And people who go for a walk around the block or two blocks or three blocks or get on their bicycle or do any of the other things that Canadians do to relieve stress after a terrible

winter is actually what we should be promoting. There's good reason. The outdoor transmission of this is tiny. That's what the data still tells us. Roger, you're furious, grab your bike, grab your kids, get on a bike and go for a bike ride. Trust me. We've practically biked halfway across the country over the last six months. But, you know, I personally, that's where I'm at, you know, where you're at, which is, you know, let's try to maintain some of our civil liberties.

Let's try to be balanced and nuanced. but let's also acknowledge that it really has not worked for us as a public health approach, that we have this laundry list of businesses, everything from bike stores to hair salons to nail salons to, you know. They're closed. They're closed. They're all closed right now. Well, they are right now. But historically, you know, we've created this very broad definition of what is open or what's available, big box stores versus small retailers at curbside. it's complicated. And there's a side of me that wonders, like, you know, maybe it's time just to get really simple here and to say,

we need a circuit breaker. Yeah. We need a two-week sequestration of society as painful and as difficult, as horrible as that's going to be. Because otherwise, what I worry about Janus is, you know, if we're at 16 to 18,000 cases, what people don't, I think, fully appreciate, I didn't, is that because of a lot of the therapies that are, causing people not to die of COVID.

What it means is that they're staying in ICU beds for weeks, some cases, months. Yeah. So when you hit these types of numbers, you are loading up our ICU system beyond capacity into triage, not for weeks, but for months. And we will have no reopening of the economy. We will have no return to normal until that ICU capacity gets down. And it gets down significantly lower than it is today. before we've contemplated these weeks of case counts that could be two to three times higher than they are

today. So I, you know, I've never been a fan of these kind of strict controls because I think they are just psychologically just so punishing and difficult for people. But I fear here that we're walking into what is going to be a very long, difficult, horrible third wave as a result of the fundamental lack of capacity that we've always had in our system when it comes to critical care. You know, we are in front of an absolute disaster in our ICU's, an absolute disaster. And you're right, Roger, you are right to focus on this. And, you know, think back to Italy at the beginning of this. Yeah. Think back to New York in April. That's what I worry about. Yeah. You were right. We are on the verge of that. And to say open more ICU beds is not possible, and it's not possible because we don't

have beds. We have no more ICU nurses and doctors. We've already had physicians. We're not trained in ICU medicine. Step up. Pediatricians and cardiologists are in those ICUs. We have hit the wall, and I think it's important for people to truly understand that. So yes, close down, but don't sequester, don't put a padlock on people's doors because we have to be able to take advantage of what's safe and going to your neighborhood park and staying six feet away and sitting in a circle with somebody in your bubble is still safe. But Janice, go on a big highway here in Ontario. It's filled with cars.

There are tens of thousands of people moving around the city. Each one of those cars, I look at them, each one of those cars is a social interaction at either end, right? So we have to lock down further. There's no question about it. And it's coming ready. You're absolutely right. It's only a question of how we do it and how severe it is. And the only area where I am fighting is leave the outdoors over for individual.

Because here's what we haven't talked about, Richard. And I think it's important to put this on the table. We have an epidemic of mental health issues, especially. among kids who are out of school. There are two areas where it is so bad that, and we're not talking about it because we can't get airtime. We have an epidemic

of eating disorders. Starting with kids who are 10 years old. And boy, if it takes weeks and weeks to get an ICU, it can take months and years to treat somebody with an eating disorder. We have an epidemic

of mental health issues. And so we have to think about that and that's why I'm saying no curfew. Don't stop people from going outside, but tell people don't gather outside in groups, just yourself and somebody else who's living in your household. That's it until we get through this terrible, terrible crunch that's coming in the ICU's. Terrible crunch. We have never seen anything like this and there are two provinces that are pushing this, the limits at this point, there are two biggest ones with Vancouver and BC and Ontario even worse. And it's the variance that are driving this.

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.W. Moncdebates.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 podcast. Thanks for listening.