The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 31

Episode Date: August 6, 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 focuses on three stories in the news: China introduces sweeping new virus controls as delta variant outbreaks happen in multiple cities; are we seeing the limits of China's lockdown heavy COVID control strategy? What could be the effects on global economic recovery if China can't fight off the delta threat? And, how worried should we be about the possibility of an “omega” strain that evade vaccines completely? – Two of Afghanistan's major cities are battling large scale Taliban military incursions with possibly thousands of civilian deaths occurring already; is a complete Taliban takeover of Afghanistan a possibility? Or, is a collapse back into outright civil war the more likely outcome? And, what is the West's responsibility after spending two decades and trillion dollars to supposedly “rebuild” Afghanistan? – Iran swears in a new hardline President; what does the elevation of Ebrahim Raisi to president of Iran foretell for the region, Israel's policy towards Iran, and the Biden administration's efforts to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons? 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.com, and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www. Monk Debates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Redyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our weekly monk members-only podcast. This is the program where we provide you with some analysis and insights into the big issues and ideas changing our world. As our guest on all of these programs, we're exceedingly fortunate to have Janice Gross Stein.

She's the founding director, the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally best-selling author, scholar, and a very, very proud Canadian and enthusiastic soccer fan. someone who is talking to me right now, just moments. We're recording this after the Canadian women win gold in Tokyo, Japan for soccer. Janice, you're related. What a moment that was, Rudyard, high drama. Each side misses three in that first round of five. We are into sudden death if we were scripting this.

It could not have been more dramatic. Canada wins a more ecstatic. Christine Sinclair is impossible to imagine. But what a proud moment for all of us. A gritty soccer team that we can all be so proud of Rutgers. You know, I watched that team throughout this whole tournament. And when you see a captain, with so much experience, step back and give a crucial penalty kick in a game to a young member of a team,

and then turn and take off her blue arm, Captain Beck, and transfer past the torch in the last five minutes of a semi-final game. You have to say, if we show that in every university, in every corporate boardroom, in every cabinet meeting, in every province, and our federal capital, there would not be a better demonstration of what leadership really means. They deserve this win. Awesome. I am really proud. I know. And you and I kept in touch. You followed all those games, so you're not a Johnny Come Lately fan here.

You're a diehard supporter of women's soccer. So this is a great, great outcome. Our three topics this week, Janice, I want to start with number one, which is these continuing and expanding controls that we're now seeing in China to try to combat the spread of the Delta variant, which is now popping up not only in Wuhan, but in multiple cities in the mainland, even Beijing now with a cluster of cases. I want to hear your take on this, and I guess I'm wondering, as a kind of observer here, are we seeing the limits, the kind of strategic exhaustion of what has been to this point, both in Australia up until recently and China, a very effective COVID strategy, which is lockdown heavy, control the virus by controlling your populations? What's your sense of what we're seeing in China?

what might happen next. So there are two stories here. There's the COVID story and there's the China story. Let's talk about the China story first. We are smack up against the limits of authoritarianism. You know, China has repeatedly said in this last year coming out of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, we know how to do this. Look at the shambolic United States.

which, by the way, is true, look how that epidemic escalated in the United States. Now, institutions are failures. And in a sense of what Shishi Pingu has said, this is the passing of the torch of leadership. Look how competent we are. And that competence is based on zero tolerance, zero COVID in China. You get three cases. You lock down five million, ten million people. You test, you know, 12.

million people all within three days. Well, Delta is overwhelming that strategy because it is now spread to multiple parts of China. You can't lock down the, you know, 20 big cities in China all at once. And here's the second part of the story. They have not pushed on vaccination as hard as countries that have really struggled with China have done. And the third part of the story is for some reason, which is inexplicable to me, the Chinese vaccine is not as good as the messenger RNA vaccines. So China is now at the wall.

It has to have a more effective vaccine strategy. It has to have a better vaccine than it. currently has and really how stunning that a country with the scientific and engineering infrastructure that China has, it is a great power, is not able to compete to manufacture, frankly, a world-class vaccine. This is a very tough moment for China right now. So where do you think they go from here? Because as you said, it's a kind of devil's dilemma. On one hand, they have a vaccine. It isn't, you're right, as effective, even as AstraZeneca, the Johnson Johnson. So they've got a billion people, I think,

inoculated with one dose, but well behind on the second dose of their Sino Farm vaccine. So that's not a solution in any near term. Their economy is already, I think, showing some effects here of these rolling lockdowns in terms of disruptions to the supply chains. That matters to us here in the West in terms of threat of inflation, which hovers in the background. All this Janus seems to me like a, I don't know, it's not that my anxiety level is increasing, you know, in terms of Delta and its threat to Canada. That may come in, you know, unfortunately in the weeks and months. It will. Months forward. But it's more about the precariousness of our recovery. We had,

and I think an incredible dose of optimism through the early winter into the spring that we were putting COVID behind us, that we were going back to normal, that supply chains would sort themselves out, that travel would resume, that COVID was effectively in the rearview mirror and we were entering, yes, a very different chain-shaped, altered post-COVID world, but wow, it's kind of like a bad horror movie. The zombie is reaching out of the grave. It's grabbed our ankle. Where's it going to push us? Where's it going to pull us in the weeks and months to come? So just as I think we had to keep our optimism in check, because this is a very smart virus. And what enables the virus to be as as smart as it is, Roger, is the billions of unvaccinated people in the world where it can find new

homes, adapt, mutate, and that's what smart viruses do. So there is a longer game here. There's no question that over time this disease will become endemic. We will learn to live with it, just like we learned to live with respiratory infections and the flu, but there is a longer horizon. It was never an 18-month struggle. It was always going to be a matter of So there are two big points, I think, to make year. First, China's going to have to change its strategy. It is going to have to learn to live with COVID, with some COVID in its society. And if you look at China's big cities, people live densely.

You know, they are close neighbors because of the size of the population. That's harder in a way in China than it is for many other countries. Secondly, it is beyond belief the humiliation that China would feel if it had to import any vaccine. So that is going to have to be, that is a really tough knuckle problem for China. But that brutal lockdown strategy, that's not viable for China as it goes forward in the next two years. The larger question, and we haven't talked about this enough, I don't think, How do we get other parts of the world vaccinated? We rightly and understandably have looked after our own populations in wealthy countries.

No government would have survived this, frankly. Let's be realistic here if they didn't vaccinate their own population first. But when you have most of Africa still unvaccinated, huge parts of Asia still unvaccinated. This virus is going to mutate, it's going to travel. We are at a point now where the factories can ramp up production of highly effective vaccines, but they have to be distributed in other parts of the world for this end. That's a year, 18 more months. As a perennial glass half-empty participant in this two-way conversation that we have every week,

I mean, I was a little alarmed to hear Dr. Anthony Fauci this week kind of musing about the idea effectively of an omega variant. And, you know, the hypotheses here is that there is a risk that with, you know, roughly a billion mutations happening per infection per person and potentially tens of millions of infections. And then we haven't even talked about all the animal hosts that are out there that have COVID-19 circling through them. I don't know if we're going to vaccinate, you know, civet cats around the world. Fauci, you know, I thought, you know, again, maybe he's trying to scare people, frankly, into getting vaccinated, so he's upping his rhetoric and his language. But this is a very respected public figure, you know, prognosticating that we could be in a matter of the coming

year, this winter, be staring down the possibility of a version of this horrible virus that evades vaccines to the point where their efficacy is negligible. If that happens, Janice, what happens next? Is it Groundhog Day? Are we all the way back at, you know, March 2020? I love your thoughts on that because that is the kind of, well, it's not apocalyptic, but that is a scenario that we can't compare. completely rule out when the likes of Anthony Fauci and others are starting to float it.

Yeah. It is an apocalyptic vision. And, you know, it's the worst of all possible cases, Roger. And, you know, Anthony Fauci is incredibly knowledgeable and also by and large, very responsible. Measured. That's why it surprised me to hear of talking about. Yeah, measured. So you're right to pay attention to that. But let's just understand. what messenger RNA vaccines can do, one of the really great things about this technology is within, once the technology is there and is now factory-based, before it was just lab-based. Now it's factory-based, right? So within a matter of week, scientists can manufacture a new vaccine. So the way I would put your question, are we in a world where it's

possible that everybody will have to get booster shots next year? Yes. Is that apocalyptic? Is that catastrophic? No, because we've actually built up an infrastructure now, both in manufacturing infrastructure. But that Janice would be highly problematic because suddenly you're you're trying to deploy billions of vaccines all over again to re-inoculate the entire population. And you will have a holding period between when this new omega variant arrives and when you can have large-scale vaccination using the new, I agree, newly modeled spike protein in the version 4.0 RNA vaccine. That is a, that's what worries me. It's not apocalyptic, but it's certainly highly disruptive. It is potentially economically catastrophic.

Well, again, I don't, I'm going to talk us down from the edge of the cliff here, Richard. We inoculate the whole Canadian population every year for flu. You know, every year, we don't think anything about it, and we all show up those of us who understand him. We inoculate a small percentage of the Canadian population. Yeah. Well, but not enough. In this case, in this case, with these new variants and their infectiousness, you need 90% inoculation or immunity to. You do.

You do. You do. So, so we're, but again, we're not, the time has telescoped, okay? From the time you sequence, the virus to the time you actually get the new vaccine produced to the time you manufacture. It's not weeks, I agree with you. But it's a matter of months, a short time, a month or two, really, probably more closer to two.

And then we have now the infrastructure built up and running. well-oiled on how we deliver vaccines. And let me just add one other one. We've seen now what the problems of Quebec and Manitoba are doing in this country. There are vaccine passports coming. There are going to be vaccine mandates. I think we are at the tail end of that discussion now, and that's just going to go forward,

even in a country like Canada, where there are strong rights cultures. everybody understands now it is, I hope, that it is no longer about protecting yourself, although of course it's about that, but it is about protecting the community. And we are moving into a new phase, I hope. 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 program.

to access the rest of this episode and all of our Monk members podcast. Thanks for listening.