The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 47

Episode Date: November 26, 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. On this week's Munk Members' podcast explores three stories in the news. First, a “Nu” COVID-19 variant is making global headlines as the week end. What are the risks of a more infectious and possibly dangerous version of COVID to our already fragile pandemic recovery? And, how can the world address the threat of more variants like Nu emerging from the developing world? Second, Russia-Ukraine tensions were on full display this week. How likely is a hot war between Moscow and Kiev? To what extent is it in the interests of NATO members like Canada and the U.S. to be involved this conflict? And finally, Canada-America trade relations take a hit with the introduction by the U.S. of new tariffs on softwood lumber. How should Canada be managing a series of new bilateral trade and economic tensions from electric vehicles to pipelines to now softwood lumber? 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. Roger Griffiths here, your host and module. Welcome to this, our regular Friday, Monk members-only podcast. This is our weekly program where we dig into the big issues and ideas in the news,

hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. As always, as our guest, as our guide to the week that was, is Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an international acclaimed author and scholar, and she's all ours for the next 30 minutes. Or so, Janice. We haven't been as strict, I know. in the past, but there's just so much to talk about. And this week is no exception. Well, we should hear from our Monk members, whether those extra seven minutes are seven minutes

too much or not. Exactly. So please send us an email, podcast at monkdebates.com. Let us know what you think of the program. Your feedback is always important because, hey, we're doing this as much for you as for us to have these conversations. So we want to make sure they're working for you. Janice, three stories to touch on this week. And I have to start. with the news of the last 18 hours or so, the emergence of what seems like a concerning variant out of South Africa, a variant that seems to have more mutations than really has ever been witnessed or studied before, 10 mutations up from 3 on Delta. And a suggestion here that already governments around the world starting to restrict air

travel from South Africa. Boy, Janice, this looks like a case of deja vu. We discussed in the spring, you know, the threats of a perpetual cascade, a cavalcade, a variance in our future as Delta broke over us. And I hate to say, not that I told you so, but that we could kind of all see this coming. Yet the last number of weeks, Janice, had been filled, I don't know, I just sense with a feeling that we were all moving on, that this was coming to an end, that we were going to put, if not COVID, behind us. We were living with it. We were managing it.

And we were anticipating and hoping for a future that was going to be more similar to the past and less different. So talk to us, Janice, maybe first, about what you think about how this variant possibly at its early days, but kind of changes our thinking about where we are now and what happens next in this pandemic. So I was on a call early this morning, with a very well-respected epidemiologist and a group of other colleagues about this new variant. And here's what I learned, and we are early days on this.

You are right, first of all, that it is the number of mutations on the spike protein. which is unprecedented. Why is that concerning? Because as the virus mutates, the real risk is vaccine escape. That's really the problem. That the vaccine becomes much less effective

against this mutation. We don't have data yet. The consensus was vaccines will become less effective given the number of mutations, but we, it is, so early that we don't have dead yet on two key findings and that's what we're looking for. First of all, is the vaccine less effective against this new one? And secondly, and equally important, do people who are vaccinated and get it, get a very bad cold or flu, but that's all? Or does it return us

to those dark days you were talking about where we have large numbers of hospitalizations? Because that's what leads to all the severe consequences. So for everybody reading about this this week, we have no data. We have no evidence. We will have to move very quickly because it has already travel bans or travel bans. It's too late. There was already a case in the Netherlands. Hong Kong?

Yeah, a couple in Hong Kong. So yes, there may be some travel bans, but the virus and the variants move fast. faster than governments can move, even governments that are really on it. Why did we get this variant? Because we have a significant number, and this is of course what leaders have been saying around the world. We have a large number of unvaccinated populations, some in Africa. You know, South Africa is a leader in vaccination, but other countries have been struggling.

And by the way, not with supply. It is not a question of supply. In Nigeria, for example, it's a question of distribution networks, the same kind of thing that held us up in the early days, getting the sites up and running and the personnel to administer the vaccines. And when you have that, you have fertile breeding grounds for new variants. And that's frankly where we are. The gloomiest person on the call, and I'm not one of them,

call this COVID-2020, as opposed to COVID-19. That would be the darkest of the possible interpretations here. Here's the good news because I don't, I want to make sure that we give the good news as well as the bad news. We have our MNA vaccines, which are tweakable against new variants. Now, here's the story, which I think most people are not aware of. The vaccines that we all got and the booster shot, which I got,

is not against even alpha, much less Delta. It is against COVID Classic. It is the original vaccine, despite the fact that there's the capacity to update and tweak with new variants. Why? Because there's a fairly large amount of supply out there. And there's a sense you use up the existing supply. And all by the way,

the vaccine against quote classic or COVID classic has been good enough to effectively do what you just suggested about your return to a semblance of normalcy. So, Janet, I agree. There's a lot of kind of known unknowns here that we've got to work through. I guess, though, I could draw maybe two conclusions. Let's have you react to them. The first is a comment about mood. Like, this reintroduces uncertainty.

Yep. And uncertainty has been one of the things we've all really struggled with. If he struggled with it individually, just at a personal level, what are you doing next spring? Are my kids in school for the balance of the year? Regardless of how infectious or less lethal, more lethal, less breakthrough, more breakthrough, this type of news is destabilizing because it reintroduces uncertainty. And let's face it, we've all, we're a bit like an elastic band, stretched and stretched and stretched over the last. last 24 months. And a certain point, more uncertainty doesn't become easy sometimes to deal with

as those initial bouts of uncertainty. I think we have a certain resiliency to uncertainty. And this goes to governments too. It's going to create interesting questions for raising interest rates. What do we do in terms of our monetary policy? We're facing a surge in inflation. But now if there's a serious variant out there, wow, do those types of concerted steps to plan for a future of agency, where we take command of our, of our in a sense futures, where we define our economic agenda, our public health agenda. I think all of that is problematized, is eroded by stories like this. So I think we can't discount the psychological impact. And then just a final quick point is from that psychological impact, I think is a question of resiliency.

My worry is that if this turns out to be a, let's say not a COVID-2020, but let's say even just a delta 2.0, i.e. a new highly infectious strain that has a certain breakthrough capacity. you know, we have, we've spent a lot of our ammunition as a society, especially when it comes to our economic capacity on the part of government to subsidize businesses, to provide payroll supports, to transfer money directly to individuals. That horse has left the stable now. And you and I know him, we like his work. Nassim Talib, the author of The Black Swan, has this idea of the antifrasy.

It's all about, you know, resiliency, robustness. We've blown through a lot of our resiliency and robustness to get us to this point. So what worries me is how much is left in the tank, how much do we have collectively to respond to, let's hope not COVID-2020, but even a Delta strain 2.0 because so much blood, treasure, debts, deficits. all of that has gone shooting out the door to get us to this point where we hoped we were finally turning the corner. What's your take on that? Roger, you just quoted Nisim Taleb, whom you and I book like. Let me quote somebody else that I think you and I on balance like Henry Kissinger, who once said,

the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. we will do what we have to do. We do that over and over and over again. Let me just put this in a bit of a larger context here, that no matter what this variant turns out to be, we are not back in March 2020. Because we have RMNA vaccines, in a true crunch, a vaccine can be tweaked in six weeks

and then you've got to roll it out the door again. But we've stood up distribution networks. There is a greater capacity. You know, we have vials now. There are factories. Jonas, that's six weeks, then months. I was reading some research this morning. You know, the earliest that they started right now on this, on this variant,

is to have a vaccine ready for distribution by April in the United States. Forget the rest of the world. I'm just talking about the largest, deepest, most sophisticated pharmacological, biomedical production space in the world, which is the continental United States. That's April. So, so what about the rest of the world? What about an endless rinse and repeat cycle that goes on and on? Because, hey, guess what? We're vaccinating kids now. You got your booster. There's all those people in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere who haven't even got their first shot because we're so busy making sure that we're taking care of. And we're maximizing our, and we're, and

in a sense, privilege that we control a lot of the technology and the IP and the manufacturing capacity. I get it. We're being self-interested. Who wouldn't in this circumstance? But let's understand that the emergence of these variants is partly because of our self-interest and our inability to truly support the South, the developing world, in dealing with this.

Yes. That's absolutely. So just a final point is that it's not going back. I agree with you to, you know, March 2020. But there is a Groundhog Day, a Wyrton-Willey field to all this, Jeddis. You can't deny that. I am going to deny it, but I think there is one clear point that comes out of this. Vaccination is not only a national problem.

It's a global problem. And this is the lesson. This is why we're talking about this today. If you leave large parts of poorer countries, that's what we're talking about, unvaccinated with inadequate access to supply or more important and tougher to solve registered inadequate distribution networks. How do you get vaccines to rural areas where there's no local community hospital? How do you do that in poor countries?

You know, at the Halifax Forum last week, the Nigerian delegate said over and over and over, this is not a supply problem for us. It's a distribution problem. So we're going to need to think really hard about how we help on the distribution side. And that's now, I think, as a result of this, this is now going to rise to the top of the agenda where it should have been right from the beginning when the vaccine started. But we are in a much better position. And that's why I don't want to leave our listeners a feeling that we are going to go over the cliff here.

We are in a much better position. We have stood up manufacturing capacity. It's a ready to roll. Distribution networks are much better. So regardless of what we're dealing with, yeah, we might have some bumpy months, but we are not back to square one. And it is not an endless rinse and repeat cycle. Just not.

Okay. Well, we will see. Let's go on to our next topic. So, Monclisters, when we come back from this debate, we've got the big story that's emerging in Eastern Europe to dive into. So come along with us. and we'll have that discussion with you right after this short break. 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 podcast. Thanks for listening.