 Hello everyone. It's a great pleasure for me to welcome Jomo KS to our COVID-19 and international development webinar series being hosted at the Department of Development Studies at Suas. Jomo, what can I say he's one of those people it's very, very difficult to introduce him in a short space of time because of the long career that he has had and the influence that he has had as a producer of knowledge and as someone who has taken positions which are very much sort of out of the box and pushing the frontiers of thinking for not just development economics but development generally and for economics generally. That is why in the notice that we put out for today's session, I actually added a link to his Wikipedia page where some of you might have seen what a long distinguished career he has had. And the number of different institutional positions that he has held over that particular period in which he has influenced thinking and action at the level of the United Nations. For example, at the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, but also on the board of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva. Having taken his degrees from Harvard. He also taught there and in Malaysia at the Science University of Malaysia, as well at the National University of Singapore at Cornell University and at Cambridge University. Right now he is at the Khazana Research Institute, as well as at Columbia University, and he also teaches at the International Islamic University in Malaysia. I'm sure that I'm missing out on some of the things that he has recently done, but he is the author of a hundred books. Let me say a hundred plus books, some of them so offered others edited and countless numbers of academic, you know, sort of publications in the top journals of late I see that he's also in the last few years. I've been reading his material in the IPS News Service. Some of you might know that because I actually sometimes forward you those articles to read for as additions to your coursework. And we're going to keep this relatively informal. We are, you know, looking to hear from him about East Asia's experience of COVID containment. I'm going to open the floor to him. He can speak I think for about 35 or 40 minutes or as long as he likes. And as in the previous webinars. I'm basically going to take questions via chat at the end of his talk where so please, you know, carry on writing your questions in the chat and I'll keep a record of that. And once he's done, we can just open up with those questions and take further questions as in when you feel like them. Just a slight bit of information in the background you might hear the sound of an 11 year old girl. She's a daughter who is currently in on her online school. And basically she is doing her lessons. I hope that she will keep her voice down as I have asked her to do. But without any further ado, can I just welcome once again Joe Moe, the floor is yours. Mr. Subir, I think you remember, remember more about my career than I can. So that's very, very, very kind of you to introduce me so generously. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to colleagues at a friend's students at SOAS. And thank you also for mentioning the IPS articles. I've been writing them on a weekly basis, but because of COVID-19 I actually had to step them up. But very importantly, since the beginning of this year, I now no longer have a limit. I was previously limited by something called MailChimp to 2,000 subscribers and now it's unlimited and so anybody can sign up and I would welcome anybody to sign up. There are basically two categories for Malaysians, those interested in Malaysia and those not interested in Malaysia. And I presume most people in the class are not terribly interested in Malaysia. So you sign up for the, for the, what is called develop, I can't even remember the categories, but the development category without the word Malaysia in it. Anyway, let me come come back to the topic for today. My, my last two pieces, actually, one just came up with this today and another one coming out tomorrow. I usually don't write two in a week, but I couldn't put them in one article and when I tried to share them as one article, I think it caused a lot of confusion so I then resorted to, to, to breaking it up into two different articles. They both deal with that with this critical situation in which we are in right now, but I'd like to come back to that later if I may add towards the end. I also hope to have more time for discussion because it's very difficult for me to gauge the level of knowledge and understanding of issues raised by COVID-19. I must say that, that I have never been terribly interested in infection, infectious diseases, beyond taking the occasional vaccination as necessary. But COVID-19 obviously has been hugely a huge threat and and has been very, very disruptive and compelled me from a very early, early last year. I think, I think I got very concerned about it around February, which was about five weeks after the COVID-19 was first identified as a new threat. Now, I think, let me begin by identifying what differentiates COVID-19 perhaps from some of the other recent epidemics. Younger people might not know, but at least in this part of the world, but also arguably in other parts of the world, we have had a series of, of epidemics of varying scale in the recent period. And it's useful to know that remind ourselves that the, the virus which causes these COVID-19 pandemic is actually called SARS-CoV-2. And the reason for calling it SARS-CoV-2 is because it actually has many of the same characteristics compared to SARS-1, which was around 2002, 2003. It's important to recognize that SARS-1 was less infectious, far fewer people were infected, but it was more lethal. In other words, much more of the people who were infected actually died. So SARS, so this COVID-19 is actually less lethal than SARS, the original SARS, but also perhaps arguably more lethal than many of the other pandemics. So I'll just rattle off a few names. I think around 15 years ago, there was something called avian flu. Very recently, Kerala, for example, in India in 2018 had a Nipah virus epidemic. There have also been a number of other epidemics, H1N1, MERS and so on and so forth. But I think this, the fact that it's infectious and particularly the infection is aerosol-borne. In other words, it's not airborne. It requires some liquid to carry it. But the fact that the droplets can be very small allows it to be carried rather far, far meaning, you know, up to four meters. Now, this I think should not be over-emphasized because it's very exceptional that somebody who speaks with a mouthful of saliva and speaks very, very strongly and the aerosol droplets are born quite distantly. So the general recommendation was to stay about two meters away during the initial period of the epidemic, and then more recently it has been reduced to about one meter. I think whether it's two meters or one meter, basically the protection offered by masks and shields is something to be taken into consideration. I would like to make a little aside about masks and many people know that the masks which are now most recommended for public use is something called the N95 mask. It's basically a three-ply mask. And the reason for mentioning this is that this mask was actually first introduced on a mass level over a century ago. And it was introduced in the context of plague in Manchuria. Now the reason I happen to know a little bit about this is because the person who was responsible for introducing the mask there is actually from my old school where I was born and grew up in Malaysia. And he was an activist, Cambridge trained and then came back to Malaysia and was very, very concerned because this was the time when the British Empire was getting quite rich with the opium trade. The opium was, as you know, sort of opened up the China market, so to speak, and the capture of Hong Kong and so on and so forth. The first opium was the second opium war and so on and so forth. Also, of course, as you know, in the middle of the 19th century, the East India Company after the Indian mutiny closed down and basically it was the management of the empire was taken over directly by the Crown or at least in the name of the Crown. Now, so when Dr. Wu, his name is Wu, he campaigned in my hometown against the opium, which was being traded very openly. In fact, it was the single largest source of revenue for the British colonial administration. He was punished and eventually he was basically prohibited from practicing medicine in the British territories in this part of the world. So he could not go to Singapore, he could not go to Hong Kong or any place like that. Eventually he ended up working for the Manchu Emperor, the last Manchu Emperor, went to Manchuria and he he identified the plague as a pneumonic plague rather than a bubonic plague. A French expert came in and said, no, no, you're wrong, ignore the recommendation of wearing a mask and so on and so forth. And eventually, unfortunately, the French expert died within less than a month. And so everybody then turned to his suggested solution. And that mask is still the basis for the N95 mask, which is still recommended today. Now having made that little aside, a little bit of hometown pride and all that, let me emphasize that there is a larger model to that story. And that is that just as with the response to the Asian financial crisis, where I think East Asian economies responded very differently. And before that, of course, the East Asian miracle was done on very different premises as you know, we have had a history, not only dating back over a century but even in more recent times of ignoring lessons from East Asia. Unfortunately, this has been particularly tragic in the case of the COVID-19. So what we find in the case of COVID-19 was that when the outbreak first broke out in Wuhan, Wuhan City is the industrial hub of China for almost a century now. It's on the Yangtze River, which is one of the major rivers in China. And when the outbreaks began there, there was an attempt, there was a lot of confusion. Initially there was the belief that this was just a variant of the flu, of which there had been several epidemics in the past. And it was only at the end of December 2019 that it was identified as a distinct virus. And within two weeks, I want to emphasize this, within two weeks, the genome sequencing for this virus was completed, and most importantly, shared internationally. I'll come back to this issue later because I want, I'm going to argue that intellectual property rights and the refusal to share knowledge and information is one of the major impediments, not only to human progress in general, but specifically in this case, I would argue that it is actually almost genocidal in the sense that many, many people who would otherwise benefit from the vaccines are not able to access vaccines precisely because of the refusal to share this kind of information. For those of you who are very interested in this, there's a piece in the Lancet today, which announces the result of the COVID-19, of the trial of the Russian vaccine, the Stage 3 trial. Okay, let's be very clear. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have only completed Stage 2 trials. The Russian vaccine is now Stage 3, and the finding is that it is 91% efficacious, which is better than Pfizer, although not as good as Moderna, at least Moderna and Pfizer as far as Stage 2 is concerned. So, I think it's important therefore to recognize that knowledge diffusion and knowledge development is happening all over the world, including in the south, in the global south, and we find that lessons from East Asia were not learned. So, in the case of China, I think it's important to recognize that in Wuhan city, by the time the nature of the threat was recognized in the third week of January last year, China then imposed severe restrictions. Okay. And Neil Ferguson, a well-known historian from, was previously at Oxford, has gone around really telling what extent amount of lies about Chinese, what the Chinese did during this period. There's an old debate between him and Daniel Bell, Canadian Professor of Political Philosophy, where Daniel Bell basically shows that Neil Ferguson was very careful, was economical with the truth to speak, you know, to use the language of his hero, Mr. Stature. But coming back to Wuhan, by the time they realized how serious the problem was, and because of the exponential nature of the spread of the virus and infections, it was deemed necessary to have what we call stay-in-shelter lockdowns. And people were restricted not only in Wuhan city, but also in the three provinces around Wuhan, including Hubei province, which is where Wuhan is. The reason to emphasize this is because people often say why three provinces and not just Hubei is because of the location of Wuhan being on the river. A lot of workers commute on a daily basis to Wuhan city to work, and Wuhan city and its environs to work. And so there's tremendous commuting of almost five million people every day. And so it is important for us to put that into perspective. So Neil Ferguson, for example, uses the figure of five million omitting to mention that this is normal commuting traffic. He gives the impression that these five million people were traveling all over the world, spreading the virus to people all over the world. But anyway, coming back to this, in China it is customary for two major holidays to take place. One is around the time of the Chinese New Year, where many people make almost a pilgrimage back to see their hometowns, their home villages. And the second major holiday is usually during the month of October, and when people do some traveling to take advantage of the fall atmosphere and so on and so forth. China then, after workers were going back to their villages and towns and so on and so forth, they were then urged to stay wherever they were for an additional week. So there was a two week period where, but only the people in Wuhan and the immediate environs were subjected to the stay in shelter lockdown. What the reason for emphasizing all this is that staying shelter lockdowns were not imposed in the rest of China, which is well over 20 other major provinces in China. And they were not imposed in all the other East Asian countries where we have seen two things. One, we have seen the contagion being contained, and secondly, we have seen some economic growth, not the economic growth, which we saw in 2019, for instance, but for example, the economies which have been growing up largely from East Asia. We're talking about Korea, we're talking about China itself, we're talking about Vietnam and so on. So all this is important for us to bear in mind, because some of you may know that Angus Deaton, the Nobel laureate from Scotland and Princeton. He came up with a paper last week, I think, where he basically makes this argument more generally about the relative performance of economies and so on. So he's basically saying that not only lives have been lost, but livelihoods have also been lost in countries which did not take strict precautionary measures. So what happened in the rest of East Asia is very important, but what we saw a great deal of was a great deal of testing. Now, it's important for people to know that, although the tests which are done in the West are largely what are called PCR tests, these tests are usually quite expensive for developing countries. And so there are cheaper tests, which are antigen tests, less accurate, one has to emphasize, less accurate, but they are because they are so much cheaper, about 5% of the PCR tests. And I should emphasize that prices have come down a little bit over time, that this antigen tests are relatively cheaper. And it has been, and it is possible to have not only to test many more people and also test people more frequently, because just because you're not positive today does not mean that you're not going to be COVID negative forever. So there is a need for regular testing, especially for people who are highly exposed, people who are involved in frontline work, for instance, and so on. So this is very important to recognize. And the other thing which I think is important to emphasize is that the East Asian economies generally had what you might say is an all of government approach and a whole of society approach. And this, I think, is important to recognize, because in all too many governments, including unfortunately in my own country, governments have seen this essentially as a public health problem, and sometimes as a policing problem. Here for example, many of you have seen images of people who are losing their jobs, beginning to walk back to their home villages and getting beaten by the police, if they were not, if they were still on the roads and so on and so forth. And all this happened because they were given basically about four hours notice. So the situation there was probably worse than the situation here, but here too, unfortunately, we have seen an approach which has emphasized health and home affairs, health and police. And there's been very little else. If you look at, for example, Korea, which was the second most where the virus had spread most in the case of Korea you see tremendous engagement of reorganization of public transportation and so on and so forth. Work schedules were staggered. So you don't have the usual morning rush and the evening rush. You, you know, people had to come in to work at different times, public transport was reorganized to ensure that that people were practicing physical distancing. The emphasis was on physical distancing in Asia, rather than social distancing social distancing has the connotation has a lot of sociological connotations, cultural connotations which obviously were not good, but also social distancing basically the consequence of social distancing has led to a whole range of, of behavioral and psychological issues, which Angus Deethan's wife, for example, has given a great deal of attention to her name is Ann Case, also a professor at Princeton and she has done excellent work showing how, you know, mental health problems in the United States have greatly increased during the period of high globalization, as people experience either job losses, or more frequently than job losses was a deterioration in the real conditions of living and increase of household indebtedness and so on and so forth. So you basically see an all of government approach being very much emphasized in East Asian countries. And I would dare say that in most of the East Asian countries which have successfully contained the crisis, also a whole of society approach. In other words, people in society were reminded almost every day of how progress was being made they were kept constantly kept educated and informed about what the issues at stake were, why the government's government was doing certain things, and so on so forth there was very detailed explanation, and rather than have a stay in shelter lockdown, which is rather the Americans would say a ham-fisted approach, a very broad and crude kind of an approach, you had a much, much more delicate, much more nuanced and targeted approach. For example, in Vietnam never had a stay in shelter lockdown, and until November last year they didn't have a single death when there was a British pilot who had been infected, and he was considered to be in a very bad state. There were people who were even willing to donate one lung to make sure that not a single person had died in Vietnam from COVID-19. This was the level of involvement and voluntarism which you find in Vietnamese society, you know, at least until November last year. Now since then there have been unfortunately some deaths and so on so forth, but I mentioned Vietnam because when there was infection, there was evidence of a cluster in what is called a commune in Vietnam. That commune was isolated, it was basically put under quarantine, and tremendous support was given to that particular community with everybody being tested and if necessary isolated and quarantined and also treated of course. So these elements I think are extremely important, and part of the reason why Asia has been, East Asia particularly has done relatively well. Not all countries in East Asia in the situation in Indonesia, the situation in the Philippines is not terribly good and even Kerala province in India has done relatively much better and it's very, very interesting to see how social welfare measures have been introduced and the different types of innovation which have taken place in terms of delivery of various things to the communities. So there's a tangible sense in which people see that the authorities are concerned about them trying to help them to weather the crisis and so on. Now, let me go very, very quickly to another issue which might be of interest to this particular community and that is the issue of migrant workers. In many countries, especially in Asian countries, including Asian countries, foreign migrant workers tend to be very badly treated, and very many of them are usually on their own, they're single, they're bachelors, many of them are men, most of them are men, and they live in very cramped conditions trying to earn as much as they can to save as much as they can and to send home as much as they can. And their presence has basically often depressed not only wages but also working conditions in many Asian countries. So they have become the object of very mixed sentiments by different sections of the population and you can guess what the sentiments are like. There's resentment by some, appreciation by others and so on and so forth. So what we find is that Singapore, which is a relative, is a developed country, is among the top 10 richest countries in the world. But in Singapore, they managed to contain the contagion during the so-called first wave from around March and April, but around June there was a so-called second wave. And during that second wave, they were not able to contain the situation very well. And they quickly discovered that much of it was happening among migrant workers because they had really ignored migrant workers and because of the conditions in which migrant workers live and sometimes they work, they were basically, the pandemic had spread much, much more rapidly among them because they were generally young men, there were relatively few deaths, but that didn't, just because you don't die doesn't mean you're not infectious. And so the people they were coming in contact with, for example, people at old age homes and so on and so forth, people doing what are called 3D jobs, dirty, dangerous and depressed jobs. They were the ones who were conveying this. Now, let me emphasize that as we know, many, the situation has changed since then. Everybody tends to follow to varying degrees what's happening in all over the world. And I want to emphasize one other element which has been important for some East Asian countries, and that is the strength of public health systems, and particularly universal healthcare. There's a good paper in the Lancet, I think a few months ago, which basically describes what, why Thailand has done relatively well. And it's mainly due to apparently the article is correct, mainly due to steady increase in public health spending. So the levels of inequality in Thailand are nothing much to shout about there are actually bad and arguably, I have argued in the past, at least when I studied these in the, in the 20th century. The inequality was probably going faster in Thailand than any other country in Southeast Asia. But despite that, they were you, they were, they, they, there was enough of a fiscal means, enough fiscal means, and the governments, particularly the last, the last elected government associated with Taksin who's in exile, perhaps in the UK. He introduced and made a major commitment to improving public health, and although he was deposed around 2006, he, that legacy continues, and the governments have continued to improve public health systems so that is certainly another major commitment and, and perhaps part of the reason why the UK is doing relatively better than say the US in some respects, because of the remaining strength of the NHS as, as, as weak as and debilitated as it has become. Let me, without going into details, too many details about the recent situation, let me quickly move to one final, one final set of issues, and with the advent of the vaccine and I know not many people Trump, Donald Trump doesn't have many admirers around the world these days and I don't expect that to be many in so as, but I think it's very important to acknowledge that operation warped speed, certainly accelerated vaccine development in the, in the US, and pushed the Europeans to do likewise. So whether we're talking about Moderna's vaccine, or even the, the, the, the Pfizer vaccine which is essentially European developed. There has been a tremendous development, precisely because of this kind of public spending commitment, but precisely because of that, precisely because of this view that only the private sector can solve these problems. I think we have very, very serious problems. When Jonas shock developed the polio vaccine over 60 years ago. He was asked why he hadn't taken a patent for it. He said this is a people's vaccine. And he said, trying to patent the vaccine is like trying to patent the sun. You don't do that. But, you know, the health ethos medical ethos have changed, particularly the last 40 years or so of, you know, the ascendance of neoliberal thinking the presumption that only private greed can motivate people to do certain things and so on so forth. So what we have now is a very, very unfortunate situation where this mentality prevails very strongly. And there has been a proposal to have a waiver on trips provision trips is the trade trade related intellectual property rights agreement, which is part of the WTO. Okay, it wasn't. It was only legislated in 1994. And many countries did not actually bring in the national level. Legislation nation until about 10 years later. So it was only in 2005, for example, under one one thing if I'm not mistaken that India had its legislation and who benefited. I don't think even even the even pharmaceutical companies benefited that much, but it basically deprived many African countries of benefiting from the from the from the availability of cheap Indian generic medicines. You know, so you can see a lot of people losing out. So what has happened now is a very, very unfortunate situation where governments of the world of the of the rich world basically the western world. The US, at least the Trump administration and the EU and EU governments with with no exceptions that I can I know of, and very strange allies such as the Bolsonaro government in Brazil have basically opposed the waiver proposed by South Africa and India. The reason for mentioning this is because, you know, when after the new dispensation in South Africa, Mandela became president in 1994 1996. South Africa hosted the UNTED meeting, and this led to a number of changes, which eventually led to an amendment to the trips agreement. And this is called the public health exception, which allows for compulsory licensing and a number of other measures. Unfortunately, by and large, it has been very, very difficult for most developing countries to actually exercise their rights under this exception. And the company company lawyers are very, very good at gaming the system. It's very important to mention this because what we find now is a very unfortunate situation in the world that, although on paper, the means are there to to circumvent these problems. Most developing countries are not able to do so. It is only some exceptional countries, India, Bangladesh, and South Africa, and a handful of other countries, including my own country, who have been able to to use compulsory licensing and other measures to advantage. Let me give you I describe an ironic situation when even flu happened some years ago, even flew the United States government under George W. Bush at that time, gave four companies the right the compulsory licenses to build to make Tamiflu, the only known virus flu vaccine at that time, then Tamiflu was the was a Swiss thing, but the Swiss company did not agree and basically the US government under exercising the trips, their trips right trips exceptional right exception rights, basically asked those companies to to produce it. Ironically, of course, birds can fly across either Pacific or Atlantic Ocean, so even flew never reached the US. So, there were three million doses of Tamiflu in the US, which were not used, and the rest of the world was only able to buy Tamiflu at what you call it, at the regular prices. No other country, no other country was able to to to use compulsory licensing to manufacture Tamiflu, not because for technical reasons, but because simply for the for legal reasons. What we have now is a situation very, very unfortunate situation where the WHO came up, wanted to do something called and and existing sort of coalition called GAVI, the vaccine Alliance and another organization called CEP I became up with the idea which had worked in the past for so called neglected tropical diseases. The idea was that for neglected tropical diseases, the victims are mainly poor and not able to pay. So the idea then was that you buy pre ordering in in in significant quantities and subsidizing the development of the vaccine. You basically could get the private sector to do something in the in the public interest. Okay, and this was basically there. And so this involves something called AMC, Advanced Market Commitment. And it works quite well. But for COVID-19, this is this approach, basically has failed completely. We have a very ironic situation where a country like Canada has ordered five times it's the requirements of its own population. European countries have done the same. And they're quite happy to not only to pay for it, they can afford it. But basically, this has meant that other countries have basically been deprived. So recently, some of you may know that there has been a conflict between Ursula van Leyen, the President of the European Commission, who has been in a big quarrel with with the UK, I think, and with with island, because she tried to close the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, ostensibly, because she did not want the vaccines to cross over, which is ironic, of course, because the UK has much more vaccines available to it for various reasons, compared to Ireland. In any case, this happened, and it's, and she may well lose her job. She may well for be forced to resign. But the more fundamental issue really is that this whole state of affairs has basically meant that many people in developing countries will not be able to access. It's not because they can't manufacture it. India has an organization called the serum Institute of India, which has the largest manufacturing capacity capacity in the world. It is capable of producing hundreds of millions of vaccines within a fairly short period of time. But it cannot do so without the necessary information and so on and so forth. So we have a situation where the technical possibility is there. There's no limitation of technical side, but because of the legal situation and because of the intransigence of the backs of the companies and the basic defense of the principle of intellectual property, we have a situation where I say this without exaggeration, where you basically have intellectual property causing genocide. Unfortunately, there are going to be lots of people and who are going to be infected, and some are going to die unnecessarily. It's going to be a major disruption to lives, as well as livelihoods. And, and needless to say, it is going to slow down the world economy. Unfortunately, the law, this is all considered perfectly legal. And despite the willingness of many governments to break laws, including international laws on other matters, there is not, there isn't a coalition of the willing to do something about this. So this is the kind of unfortunate situation we have in ourselves at the present moment. So I just want to conclude with that. And then perhaps we can have a bit of a discussion. And, and I hope I hope this has been clear enough. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was such a wide ranging, you know, talk with so much for us to think about. It was remiss of me also to not thank you for accepting our invitation given that it's quite late at night for you over there. So that, you know, thanks again for that couple of questions have already come out in the chat we have Jules who says, Why do you think that most of the world did not follow the example of early COVID response in East Asia. And we have Alicia Farouk who says do you think COVID-19 has brought serious impact to the development of national security frameworks, particularly cyber surveillance. We are really in an authoritative position to speak on either issue. I don't know enough about how governments make their minds, but I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that much of the world still looks to the west for leadership, including intellectual leadership, including policy leadership. And as some of you may remember, or most of you might remember Boris Johnson was going for herd immunity until I think the 17th of March, last year, which is when around the time the ICL study came out Imperial College of London study came out, and basically suggested that that strategy might well result in about 2% of the population of the UK dying much higher than what was previously assumed by the Johnson government. And then we have a very unfortunate situation that, for example, many of us in the British Commonwealth, despite Britain isolating itself from the Commonwealth over the last three or four decades. We find out a very unfortunate situation where unfortunately, not many governments tend to still look west for policy guidance or intellectual guidance and so on. So, you know, for example, when the Russians first announced the Sputnik 2, the virus, everybody poo pooed it. I'll be very interested to see what happens in response to the Lancet publishing these findings today, because these findings are really incredible. So, for example, 1% compared to 90, slightly lower, just slightly lower for the Pfizer vaccine, but Pfizer vaccine is stage two trials, which are the implications are different the sampling size is different, and so on so having these kinds of results at the stage three level is very, very impressive. Chinese numbers are not terribly impressive at this point. Who knows when when, you know, because there's still this this whole question of vaccine development is proceeding very, very fast. And it's very unfortunate that the EC president is complaining about Oxford AstraZeneca, because, you know, Oxford AstraZeneca has delayed the release of some of the vaccines because they were learning I mean one should remember that the development normally takes years and all this has been done in less than a year. And so, you know, allowing some time to correct. If that is truly what happened in the case of Oxford AstraZeneca is something which is be appreciated rather than to be denigrated which unfortunately has been the case so I am guessing here I don't have an authoritative answer to the first question. And then the second question. The second question was about forms of surveillance national security, particularly cyber surveillance, yes. Yes, well, I, I think the cyber surveillance issue. I'm not sure what the question has in mind. The cyber surveillance has been going on for for for quite some time. It's not clear to me that there has been a significant increase in cyber surveillance because of COVID-19. The fact that most people most people are staying at home and all that kind of thing. And, you know, will probably mean that they're in less public spaces and there might be less surveillance as a consequence. I really have no way of answering that question in any serious empirical fashion. I suppose, you know, I mean that goes back to one of our previous webinars which we had with a scholar of the internet and of internet practices. My name is Gaudo who teaches at King's College here. And we ended up talking a little bit about the idea of a vaccine passport, where I think now airlines and so forth are asking, they've at least decided the IAT has decided or his constituents have decided that when it becomes more unrestricted. They would like to ask passengers for a so-called vaccine passport that they would like to see, you know, some kind of, you know, on an app on their phone that they have in fact been vaccinated and that that itself would, you know, be a form of surveillance but perhaps Alicia would like to reframe her question and come back. Meanwhile, we can take Didrik, Brendan Didrik. Do you think the lack of a national identity in the US contributed to the poor federal state government and individual responses. And perhaps we could make that into a broader question, because we see, for example, as you mentioned the Indian case. One part of the Indian response was a hyper nationalist and in fact a Hindu majoritarian identity formation under Mr. Modi. We don't know because we, you know, at least in my case I'm not sure about the data that they release, but certainly that was very much a part of their, you know, sort of response to create a very strong sense of national or Hindu identity. Was that something that you see in any of the East Asian context? In some instances, I'm not, I think in the West, in the US and the UK, perhaps in some parts of Europe, and certainly in Australia, there was initially quite a bit of anti Asian. And many of the Asians involved were wearing masks, and they were actually subject to a lot of social belification. I have a Japanese colleague at MIT. And he was telling me about getting on to the public transport. And as soon as he got on to the transport, and he moved to a particular part of the of the carriage, people moved away from him. And this is MIT professor. Okay, and this, this is the his, his stop is the MIT stop. Okay, so it's not exactly, you know, in fact, his stop is about. As he said, two blocks away from, from more than us headquarters. Okay. So, so I'm sure that has part of it but I think I think having a not identity politics has been around for for quite some time. And I don't think there's any less identity politics. Well, certainly there is less identity politics in East Asia, any of these societies but you take Kerala, for example, Allah has got, you know, perhaps a Hindu majority but barely Malabar is quite Muslim. And then you also have significant Christian minorities. And, and, and, but the, the, the, and, and of course, Kerala is, is unique, perhaps, because it has so many migrant workers who were expelled from the Middle East, when the price of oil came down and so on, about two years ago. When they come back and very many of them were living off the savings and so on, then you have a second expulsion, when, when, when the lockdown was announced in. So many of them moved from wherever they were, often Delhi, or Bombay, Mumbai down back to Kerala. So, you know, so these, although these are Malayalees, Keralites, they were, they were in some sense alien, you know, they were coming back. But, you know, and, and there was a lot of suspicion and don't forget that Kerala was the first place where somebody who was discovered as being COVID-19 positive, and that was a student who had come back from Wuhan. There was a lot of Kerala, Keralite students in Wuhan studying in the engineering schools in Wuhan. So, and it was one of them who brought it back to, to, to Kerala and, and to India. It's not necessarily meaning to do so, but this this certain in January itself. So, I, it's very difficult. You know, because I, you know, because identity politics is significant, it has grown a lot in, but it means different things in many different societies. Hindutva chauvinism in India has very different implications from, say, you know, white Christian, you know, chauvinism in the US. And in turn, it has different implications from what Bolsonaro does in Brazil and so on. So I am a little hesitant. There might be something to what is being said is often said, I've had to do things whenever I make this argument about East Asia. I hear often hear two things. One is that, oh, this homogenous societies, Japan is homogenous, Korea is homogenous and, and so on and so forth. And the other thing I often hear is that, oh, you cannot generalize from them. They are all run by communists. I mean, you can't. So I say, you know, what Korea is not a Sunday run by a Communist Party. They say, yeah, yeah, they run communist like because of influence of North Korea. So people can can twist and turn the arguments anyway, just having an authoritarian government is not much. It's not much protection doesn't offer much protection. So I, I would not. I, again, I'm sorry, I really cannot answer that question. Can I just, you know, there's a variation on that, especially the Korea, you know, argument which I had from a Korean colleague who left so as in is now teaching in Seoul. And his point was that because of military conscription. There is a feeling of rule compliance and the idea that you know whole of society all of the state and everyone is responsible. The argument was not so much based on the communism or on the cultural homogeneity, but was based on rule compliance that comes from military conscription but you know, I don't know if there is enough of a sample of countries that where one could make that kind of an argument in general. I also was very interested in what you said about Kerala because there's a third level of migrant issues there which is that a lot of migrant workers from the rest of India, especially my, my state D. Now work in Kerala in plantations and so on. And one of the things that the Kerala government did in contrast with many other states or the national level was that it stopped them from going. It provided them with food, and it provided them with medication as well as income. So for example, many of the people who were returnees of the Gulf took this as something and who are many of them are Muslims took this as part of their charity functions as good Muslims. They have all kinds of stories of people who are owners of plantations who had come with bought the plantation after coming back. You know in subsequent waves of returns of migrants from the Gulf, and saw this as a as a good deed that they were doing so both at the level of the state in terms of the provision of proper shelter proper medication housing money in hand. So the Kerala government also recharge their mobile phones so that they could communicate with their families back in the villages that they came from. Then of course they use quite a lot of the institutions that the Kerala government has made over the last 20 years, you know for other kind of distribution of social services. So basically we're able to marshal that in that. So yeah, interesting that you know that's that Kerala comes in and of course it is such a such a good example from that point of view. I think there's one question here from Sasha Gill who says, how does one understand community solidarity in response to COVID-19 in Vietnam is it just a cultural thing or is there another way to understand that as well. One of the strongest instances of of solidarity in relation to the, to the, to this crisis is really is partly Carol, the kind of solidarity I knew, thank you very much for for reminding me of the third migrant element. And this, by the way, for, you know, for everybody to remember is a situation where Kerala probably has the most difficult fiscal problem. There's no fiscal base, this agriculture to speak of. It's extremely difficult so you have very modest fiscal means because of the nature of the Kerala economy. So it's particularly challenging I think what the point you raise actually is a very important reminder, but social sort in the case of Kerala it has been articulated in various different ways, which are actually quite well known the best because there has been some coverage. And perhaps it's the way it has been articulated in places like like Vietnam or Laos, you know, but again you have so called communist parties ruling there. In case of, of, of Korea. I part of the reason I became very active very early on the on the on COVID-19 was because I stopped there for 36 hours on the 4th of February. And I, I was looking for masks for for my father in law, who needed mass because of a volcano eruption in the Philippines. Okay, not not nothing to do with COVID-19 and I couldn't find mass, because all the mass in the Philippines have been sold out because of the volcano eruption. And there was a lot of ash, because it was a very major eruption. So I then came back here on a Wednesday, and on Friday morning I got a call from the hotel I stayed in for only one night, telling me that although I had checked in on Tuesday, somebody had left the hotel on Sunday and had later been tested and had been tested COVID positive. Okay, so you can see what is going on here. Okay, you have. He's tested confirm positive. Everybody in the hotel, even those who have gone back to their own countries is informed about, you know that they might have been exposed. And then I was even given some advice on things I could do. And that kind of thing which which which made me aware height underline for me how, how, how, how, you know, how much what what is called contact tracing what was going on. And I contrast that to what has happened here in Malaysia. There was a major religious gathering. In fact, the major religious gathering, but it was, it was sort of clandestine was responsible for the major cluster in Degu city in Korea, but in Malaysia, there was a major religious gathering of public you probably know this public group they meant and that group that gathering a spread COVID-19 to India Bangladesh. And, and about five other countries in this part of the world. But of the, of the 18,000 who attended that 16,000 were Malaysians. Okay, and, and as of my last checking which was about two months later, almost 5000 had not even been traced. Okay, I mean that, you know, so you don't even know what the police are doing. Okay, it should be, you know, all the detective detection capacities of the police should be used for things like this, instead of catching people on the street and you know, beating them up and you know they don't often they don't even quite know, they don't quite understand why they're being forced to stay at home and so on and so forth. You know, so it's a constant education is actually quite important. Now, I, you know, I was involved as you mentioned in, in, in, in the FAO, and I did quite a bit in terms of trying to promote the idea of, of public health education, particularly nutrition education, using the media, using the public, the commercial media. You know, so, so for example, in, in the US, the former Dean of Public Health at the UCLA School of Public Health, actually is also an advisor to two very popular programs. One is called Grace Anatomy with some of you have watched and it has been running for about two decades. You mean the TV show Grace Anatomy. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and but you know they insert all kinds of public health messages in the program. And the other one of course which is also quite popular, not sure whether it's rich UK, it's called law and order SVU, which is about often to do with sexuality and sexual relations and so on so forth. So, you know, public health messages are being conveyed all the time by by having this kind of advisory thing. And it's very easy to do that with other things, you know, and, and I've, but of all the people I was talking to. During the major conference which I was involved with organizing. The main interest came from very strange from places like Korea which produces a lot of soap operas which sell, but nothing from India, this Bollywood, nothing from Hong Kong or anything like that. Nothing from, from Brazil, from Mexico, Colombia, which produces a lot of soap operas. Let's go back to Hispanic world. And but interest from the Vatican. But that's partly because I invited the pope to open the conference. I see. There are, you know, I don't want to, you know, hold you for too long, because I know it's very late for you. But I was very late for you guys. Well, actually, you know, it's only five quarter past five almost here. But I wanted to sort of, you know, you mentioned Africa very briefly. And of course, you know, we, I think initially there was a lot of fear for Nigeria for Ghana and so on, but they did okay. In fact, for a while, the Ghanians actually, you know, the head of the public health service, I think, also produced many videos for YouTube and so forth. And in fact, his major argument, it seems to me the Ghana and the Senegalese and the Nigerians was that they had been through regional pandemics before. And that that experience of having to deal with those kinds of things produced a degree of readiness and also some degree of self-reliance because they had seen that it was not easy for them to go to the international community and to, you know, rely on their resources. So many thoughts on that, you know, countries that were expected to do much worse, but came out doing much better than people feared. Right, I'll try to answer this with a couple of quick anecdotes. Yeah. You know, when the testing of the new vaccines took place, when the vaccines were being used, quite a number of people in Norway. Okay, but they were all over 85 years old. Okay, so obviously, although people say the virus doesn't discriminate, it discriminates in terms of its effects. Yeah. And, you know, half the people who are infected show no symptoms. Either they're pre-symptomatic or they have no symptoms whatsoever. And it's very younger people. So what has happened and what I'm being told and, you know, the Indian figures are not that bad either. Exactly. And part of the reason I'm being told, I have not read the literature enough, but what I'm told is that because life expectancy is much shorter in countries like India and many African countries and so on. The impact is much smaller. So it is only in societies where life expectancy is much higher. And where, do you understand the term hail? Yeah. Healthy life expectancy. So healthy life expectancy is actually almost as high as the life expectancy. And then there you're more likely to see an impact. So some society like Korea, where people are, sorry, or Japan or China where people longevity is quite high, there you expect a greater impact. Whereas people in India whose life expectancy is I'm not sure whether you have even reached 70. Upper 60s kind of thing. Yes. Yeah. And they have a much younger population, 60 or percent, etc. Exactly. And African populations are even younger. So I'm told that that is part of the reason. But even among African populations, Senegal is doing much better than some of the other countries. And again, I'm not quite sure why. I think one colleague of mine is quite involved in the Senegalese response, but I don't have a clear idea why but everybody has their favorite explanation. The being generally skeptical about everything. So I don't want to repeat one particular view just because it happens to be from a friend. Sure. We have to be much more rigorous in looking at the evidence. But I suspect age has got something to do with it. Yes. Let's take the final round of questions. Sorry, sorry. The other point I was going to make is that it is the countries which are most isolated, particularly from air travel. How many people go to Chad or Niger. And the numbers are very low there. If there's not many people moving in and out, it's very unlikely that people will be infected. And the other thing of course is Donald Trump's standard answer. If you don't test, you won't know. Same for India initially as well. And as it turns out, there are parts of India where people have not heard of COVID and therefore have not suffered from COVID because they are in the very remote mountains in the deep forests. Final three questions. One of them is actually on Malaysia. Do you think the current and this is Alicia Farooq coming back. Do you think the current protocol employed by the Malaysian government is the most effective way to go about it with the current MCO, which I don't know the full form of but I'm sure you do. Very short, a simple answer to it is I've been quite critical of this. As I mentioned earlier, the stay in shelter lockdown or what is called the MCO in Malaysia movement control order is a very blunt instrument and imposing it at the national level. But we have a very complicated situation in Malaysia because there's a government with a razor thin majority and parliament was suspended. The first movement control order did not involve any suspension of parliament only last month was parliament suspended ostensibly for public health reasons. And so, you know, so the whole situation and understanding of many of these issues is complicated. A group of 46, 44 of whom are medical practitioners and the president of the nurses union, plus myself, we signed a petition. A letter to the prime minister about a month ago, basically arguing that there are a variety of issues which need to be improved in Malaysia and we really do not agree with having a stay in shelter lockdown. As I have argued throughout this, what I think we need to take far more precautionary measures. But the movement control order is a very blunt instrument. I think you did address a part of Nikhil's question, and which is about do you sort of favor nationalized farmer industry or in fact would you, in my view, would you think that there should be a global sort of, you know, especially for things which are so lethal as this one. Should there be some kind of global protocol or, you know, for free, you know, distribution of goods because of vaccines as public goods in line of what you said earlier in fact in your in your piece today in the IPS site which I saw on vaccine nationalism. What what is the kind of level at which you would like to see institutional change take place. Well, I think you know what I argued there and we would be arguing the series of other articles and have argued in the past about this. I have, for example, written about this in connection with other issues. I believe that the French university has also written very fully on this. And I don't know whether you've seen this recent piece by Acharya and ready. On, on, on this is it's quite a useful shot and useful piece in a very unlikely place the barons magazine. Okay. Basically, the big problem now is that we are in a mess that we meaning the whole that the intellectual property has managed to secure a strong foothold. It cannot be dislodged the power of, of the pharmaceutical companies have been able to mobilize their governments behind them very very successfully. And this is not an emergency. You know, requiring that kind of extraordinary measures I don't know what is, you know, you know, certainly that the scale of the threat is much greater than, than, than when Mandela successfully push for the public health exception. So, I do think that it's going to be very difficult to bring, bring about change so. I think, I actually think that, practically, India and South Africa should have gone about it differently from the ball in the other foot. You know, control the ball and the other court by by insisting that the public health exception would have allowed should have allowed this. Then, rather than asking for a special waiver. Okay, because if you read the, the letter the law. The public health exception actually, in my view, I'm no lawyer covers this kind of situation. So, asking for a waiver, you basically are asking for an exception to the rules. Right. You see the technical point, you know, and, and unfortunately, I think we're now in a very difficult situation. And I think I made this appeal as you, as you know, to the Biden administration. The WHO is not good enough. Being more positive in the WTO is needed. And one very good signal which would, which would gain a lot of support. You know, internationally would be precisely to, to, to support the waiver and to advocate for the waiver. I want to compare this with, with the Doha round, which unfortunately has gone nowhere, but the whole round after the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. It also seemed as if WTO was not going to move after all. Basically, after 911. Almost all the countries in the world, regardless of political tendencies and so on support the express solidarity with the US. And that basically moved bush to push for a round so because most of these countries were developing countries. So he agreed to the idea of a so called development round. Now you and I know that the development round is worth of its name but, but the fact was that they felt obliged to make a major concession like a development round. And this I think is the moment we are in right now. Here's the Biden administration, trying to regain leadership for the US on a completely different basis from the previous administration. The best easiest ways to do so is to do is to make a very major concession. I just want to remind you of something else which happened about 30 years ago also about 42 years ago, 43 years ago. The Soviet Union challenged the US to to eliminate smallpox in the world. And we can do it in 10 years if we work together. And this was at a WHO meeting to the surprise of the of, and at the time I think it was Jimmy Carter, the US, the US took up the challenge, put in the money. And the Soviets of course put up put up money and a few others as well. And within 10 years, we saw the end of smallpox. And as if it cannot be done. But I think we really have to seize the moment. And that's why, you know, somebody called me up earlier and said, you know, why are you being so, so nice to Mr Biden, you know, what he is and etc, etc. Yes, but there are special moments and who would have expected Franklin Delano Roosevelt present to that, to that moment in 1933. You know, and likewise, you know, we expected so much of, of, of Obama, this wonderful rhetoric, you know, and he did not be a great disappointment so I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and and but also keeping my and also having a prayer under my breath. Thank you so much, Joe Mo to end on such a, if I can call it optimistic note or at least hopeful note and you know to have such a wonderful conversation with you and for you to answer so many questions in such a comprehensive and easy to easy to fall away for all of our listeners. I wish you all the best, and I wish you good night. I hope you get a good night's sleep. What time is it over there. It's close to 1.30. Okay, all right. Okay, we've taken enough of your time and I hope to. This is when I start working. It's easy to stop working. I stop. It's easier to work at night when it's cooler and the daytime is just too hot. Oh, too hot. Is it okay. All right, all the best to you and I hope that our parts will cross again soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all the rest of you for for your interest and okay. Bye bye.