We Must Defend Multilateralism
April 21, 2020
Interview with Jeffrey Sachs Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network on the COVID-19 pandemic (links to some of the videos below the transcript)
Opener
I'm Jeffrey Sachs, university professor at Columbia University and Director of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
Introduction by James Chau
Jeffrey Sachs is one of the foremost architects of the global future. He uses his work and his life to defend the multilateral system and in his own words, he is a “big believer” in the global goals that define our ambitions to the year 2030. To date, we have focused on COVID-19 as a pandemic that is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. But we haven’t looked hard enough at how it is unraveling the world and bringing us farther than ever from achieving a fair and equitable tomorrow. I’m James Chau and welcome to this conversation.
James Chau
Jeffrey Sachs, welcome to The China Current and thank you very much for sharing this time. I want to start by asking you how you are and how you feel, about five months into this pandemic, which is not only quick, it's flexible, and some would say very ruthless?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
It's a very frightening time. My family and I are sheltered. New York City is one of the world's epicenters of the pandemic right now. Our country was not ready, it did not prepare, and it became overwhelmed by the epidemic. I'm also very worried about politics. I'm very worried about global cooperation, I am very worried about poor countries that don't have the resources to cope. So, there's a lot of reason for worry right now.
James Chau
A lot of people have been talking about therapies and vaccines. When will it be ready? Is it going to be a guarantee? And even if it is achieved, will it be available to every human on the planet? But let's just say we've got a tick for all of those: is that going to be an answer to ending a crisis that has taken on significant social and economic dimensions?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
I doubt that a vaccine is going to come in the same time horizon as this acute crisis, acute in the sense that economies are partially shut down. People are suffering economically, and the disease continues to spread. I could be wrong, but typically vaccines are developed in the course of years, not months, whereas epidemics rage in a matter of weeks and months. So, I don't think that it's going to be the vaccine that will be the immediate response to this epidemic. I think we're going to need other kinds of responses, mainly containment of the epidemic through public health measures, as our first line of resort, and global cooperation to make sure that we don't leave a devastating loss of lives and livelihoods in the wake of this epidemic.
James Chau
You've been writing as usual. In one of those opinion pieces, you talked about your two options for a way forward. Now, some people have been talking about testing, but you specifically split it between the rapid isolation of infected individuals, but also shutdown of activity that involves face-to-face contact. Is that realistic? Are either those realistic?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
The epidemic is decisively slowed when one infectious individual tends to pass the disease along to less than one new case. That's how you control an epidemic. There are various ways to slow or stop or reduce the transmission of the disease. One way is for people who are infected to be isolated or quarantined, and if they can be identified early, possibly through testing, possibly through symptoms, and then stay at home, or if home is not adequate because there are other people at home who would be vulnerable in a quarantine facility, that's one method. The second method is personal hygiene and physical distancing. If each infected individual stays away from other people, is wearing a face mask, if other people are wearing face masks and using hygiene, this also at least reduces the frequency of transmission. A third way which half the world is using right now is closing down a lot of economic activities so that people don't go out and they don't mix.
That's an extremely costly approach. Why is it being done? Because these governments haven't done the alternative of focused case identification, isolation focused, quarantine focused methods of reducing the transmission. So, what I keep arguing in the US and internationally is the lockdown approach might have been a last resort as the epidemic was overtaking countries. But we have to move beyond that by moving to public health. Public health means you identify infected people very rapidly, you isolate those people, you trace their contacts. Even if there aren't test kits, there are symptoms. They're not perfect, but they can be used to presumptively identify people. And we need all of the other measures of hygiene and physical distancing. We need people to be wearing face masks.
That's usual in Asia, but not usual in most of the rest of the world. We need to be screening for fever by all of the thermal monitoring equipment. We need to have hand sanitizers, we need to stop shaking hands and hugging right now. We need to avoid large events that could become super spreading events, big religious meetings, or sports events, or highly concentrated crowds where the disease can spread. We have to be smart about stopping the transmission. But if we're not smart, the only alternative is closing down economic activity, which is terribly expensive, and a huge, huge cost for lots of people who have no alternative, but to go out and work.
James Chau
You mentioned Asia there and you've written about what you call an "East-West divide" where you say East Asian countries are generally outperforming the United States and Europe in terms of their response success. Let's start off with China, the biggest of those countries in the Asian region. How well do you think, or how well not do you think, it performed in its early outbreak and since?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
The China story is complicated and there are still pieces to be filled in. The epidemic began sometime in late 2019. We don't really know when precisely. The cluster of cases in Wuhan was identified by the doctors there in mid-December, or maybe around December 20. By late December, it was pretty clear there was something really nasty going on with the new pneumonia and most likely a viral disease, something likes SARS. A couple of weeks passed until it was clarified that there was a new coronavirus. This was sequenced and then put online around January 11 for the whole world to know about this. Wuhan made a very serious mistake at the start of the Chinese New Year, 18th of January where there was a massive New Year's party of thousands and thousands of people. This definitely spread the disease widely, then those people dispersed to different parts of China and across the world, and that was a spreader of the disease. I think China's leadership realized this was out of control at that point, and on January 23 Wuhan was locked down, then Hubei province, then all of China basically.
From that point on, China's performance has been remarkable. Indeed, China showed what I think most public health experts would have thought to be impossible, which is that even after an epidemic has broken out, it can still be contained. Because China battled this disease back down to near zero, not to zero. But to near zero. It's a remarkable achievement. It gave hope for the rest of the world that you could actually fight the epidemic, not just suffer the epidemic. Other countries in Asia were afraid from the start because they knew about SARS and as soon as the World Health Organization heard about the mysterious pneumonia at the end of December 2019, they started screening passengers coming in from China. So, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea really stood up and took notice, and kept the epidemic limited.
In Western Europe and the United States, basically, the politicians and the system was asleep at the switch, even though there were plenty of alarm bells going off. There wasn't a public health response. The cases came originally from China, then started spreading in the community, and the numbers got large before anybody realized it. In the United States, we had absolutely disastrous political leadership from the Trump administration. Trump himself was as irresponsible as anybody could be, saying repeatedly in January and February, ‘No problem, it's just the flu, it's all under control, it'll go away magically in April’. A track record I'm afraid that is the worst of any president I know of in American history in regard to a major public health or security emergency.
Now we're paying the price, we have more than 40,000 deaths. New York is at the center of that for the moment, but this is a disease that's all over the United States. So, I would say the performance has been differential, East Asia better, more alert, prepared by SARS, better personal hygiene in the sense of physical distancing, face mask wearing, it's much more normal in Asia to have your temperature taken by a thermal scan. If you go to an Asian airport, you'll almost always walk through a quarantine desk and the scanner is on. In US airports, not at all, in European airports, not at all. In other words, East Asia is much more prepared for epidemics than Western Europe and the United States. These rich countries of the West are paying a fearsome price for that.
James Chau
You mentioned the United States, a lot of people have strong emotions about all countries today, and especially China. When you mentioned the word China, a lot of red flags go up for different people, rightly or wrongly, we're not here necessarily to talk about that. But what I worry about Professor Sachs is that China had the early experience, as you said, it was a mixed bag of experience as well. Do you think that some people are allowing those emotions to get in the way of seeing lessons that could save lives in their own communities?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
Well, I think unfortunately, the situation's even more frightening than that because the US right wing was attacking China beforehand. The Trump administration had its so-called trade war against China and then its technology war against China. I regarded those as dangerous, wrong, absurd on false pretenses, but it showed China's successes of recent years had triggered a response by the American right wing, the hardline nationalists, to say we have to confront China and Trump was in the middle of confronting China, and I think very dangerously so and I opposed it all along. Then came the epidemic.
Now, the right wing in America is trying to use the epidemic as another part of its fight against China. This is stupid and dangerous. When I say in the United States that China contained the epidemic, and shows lessons of how to do this, I'm attacked for saying something 'good' about China. And then I get accused, ‘Oh, it's all lies, nothing's true, everything's phony’ by people who are ignorant or malicious. But the fact of the matter is, we're in a difficult and dangerous period right now because there was nationalism already, there was in the United States growing hardline against China, mainly in my interpretation because China has been successful. And its success is not something that some Americans want to see actually. Because they don't like the competition. They're a little afraid.
So, there was already that mood. And now, of course, this epidemic is being politicized by the right wing. When I say the "right wing", I mean mainly the Republican Party in the United States, but it's both parties to some extent. And when Trump closed the funding for the World Health Organization, there were two reasons for this. One, is anything that he could do to deflect his own failure he would do. So, this was a move to try to cast blame on an organization that is so central and vital for global well-being that it was a shock to the world when Trump did that. But also, the charge was WHO was too close to China.
So, it was politicizing the pandemic, as part of this US fight against China, which has I want to emphasize again and again, is both dangerous and wrongheaded, and very worrisome to me because there's a lot of nationalism and a lot of US propaganda that gets engaged in this and it's not good. We need cooperation. We need peaceful relations. We need to be learning from each other. And we need to be solving global problems together. Whether it's the pandemic or climate change or many other problems, where the US and China need to work closely together, not as antagonists, but as partners in solving global problems.
James Chau
It saddens me. I know that you're more concerned about the big picture. But it saddened me to be reminded of your experiences over a year ago. That was part of the reason why you came off Twitter at the time because of this unrelenting attack, and very irrational attack, from certain constituents. When we look at the US-China relationship, we used to talk so much in recent years about the trade dispute, the trade war. It was all in terms of their assets: soybeans, pork, iPhone components. Do you think the new weapons now is going to be in the form of face masks, surgical gowns, ventilators?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
The issue is in my opinion and I wrote a recent book about this called, ‘A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism’. Some nationalists in the United States don't want success of other countries and they regard China as a threat. I just regard China as a successful country that has made its way from poverty, and has great talent and skills, and a lot to offer to the world. So, my interpretation is very different, which is we shouldn't have this kind of conflict at all. It's a big world and we need a successful China. We need successful all parts of the world for the world to work well. But the trade war was a pretext for something deeper, which was a nationalist US attempt to keep China in its place in a way, and that's why it quickly moved from a trade war to a technology war.
With the attacks on ZTE and Huawei, Huawei’s "crime" in quotation marks is that it made the best, low cost 5G system. That was definitely an affront to the United States. Otherwise, Huawei has great equipment that countries around the world want, because they want 5G capability. So, all of this is to say, we need to find the way out of this risk of confrontation because it will not serve the world. It will not serve the US, it will not serve China, and it certainly won't serve any other country. If there is this rising tension between the number one and number two economies of the world, and especially when we're facing global crises like a pandemic, or environmental crises, we have to cooperate. It's the only sane thing to do. And therefore, I really hope we can find a way to lower the tension dramatically, not politicize what is not political. The virus is not political. It wasn't unleashed by anybody. It wasn't caused deliberately by anybody. It is a tragedy that we need to control together cooperatively, as fast as possible period.
James Chau
And we have seen these two great countries work together in just the way that you aspire them to once again. A couple of years ago during the West Africa outbreak of Ebola, these two countries came together politically and also on the frontlines of their health workers. What would make me very sad is to see them decouple in any way: the United States seems to want to move in that direction, to decouple from China, but also to decouple from the multilateral system as a whole. Do you think either is really going to happen or is it more rhetoric?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
I don't know what's going to happen to my country because the politics are very unstable. It is really an open question. What I would say is that the vast majority of the world wants a multilateral system. When the US pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, it did so as one country alone, the other 192 United Nations member states stayed in the agreement. When the United States pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, it was one country alone, the United States. The other countries wanted this to continue. When the United States attacked the World Trade Organization appellate body, it was one country, the United States that was doing this.
So, my advice to all the rest of the world, and with China directly, is protect and support the multilateral system. Hope that the United States does so as well. We have a lot of supporters of the multilateral system in the US. I'm not alone in that. It's just that our politics is going in a bad direction. But for China and other countries, don't react to US unilateralism by becoming unilateral. React to unilateralism by emphasizing multilateralism, because this is the only solution. If the United States pulls out of funding the World Health Organization, pour money into the World Health Organization. Don't let the US cripple the... don't let the Trump administration cripple the multilateral system.
Defend it. Preserve it. Go by the rules. Because the vast majority of nations of the world want it and need it, and don't want to fall into the kind of disarray that our world has known in the past. As a historian I think of the 1920s and 1930s as a time when nationalism became dominant and it led to global disaster. So, we really need to take the steps, no matter what the Trump administration ends up doing, for the rest of the world to protect multilateralism.
James Chau
It's not just the World Health Organization, it's the United Nations. And it's also the entire way of life as we've known it since the end of the Second World War. I love the UN. I know you do as well. But you're the global architect: so, what would you say directly now, to those people who are unsure, who've been swayed by the old narrative, who think that the UN is irrelevant?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
The UN was created, invented in 1945, to not have another global war and it has played a vital, essential and unique role in that, during the period since 1945. It is our way of living peacefully on the planet, the UN Charter. The UN Declaration on Human Rights is our moral charter for the whole world, all countries are signatories to it. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is our legal framework for protecting the planet. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity is our legal framework for preserving biodiversity against the damages that humanity is causing.
The World Health Organization is our global way of fighting pandemic diseases. We need the United Nations to be able to live like rational human beings in a civilized way, keeping peace, and not destroying the environment, and protecting the vulnerable. That's the purpose of the United Nations. It's vital. When it's attacked, it's all the more reason to defend it. This is an essential time at the UN, 75 years, that the young generations step forward and say, this is the world we want, a world of international law, international cooperation, international decency. We don't want to fall into a world of conflict. We can't afford a Third World War. It would be definitely the end of humanity. It's unthinkable, except that it's possible if we don't have the bulwark of international law and international decency.
James Chau
The talent of the UN family, including the WHO family is built for these times. It's been tested of course, a time of nationalism, as you said, populism, a rise in inward thinking. What do you see next happening?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
I hope we learn some lessons from this epidemic. This was well warned, ahead of time by experts about the risks that we knew from SARS 2003 onward about coronaviruses specifically. We had ample warning. The question always is, can we think clearly? Can we mobilize the science? Can we turn clear thinking and science into public policy? Can we do it cooperatively? These are always the same questions whether it's fighting an epidemic, keeping peace, responding to a particular global disaster, or fighting climate change. Can we think clearly? Can we use science? Can we make public policy based on the principles of science and evidence? Can we cooperate globally? This is our checklist. And we face it now with COVID-19. When we get past COVID-19, we're going to have to understand how did this happen even despite all the warnings? Why was the United States for example, so unprepared for this? What can we do better because we're going to face more and more challenges, where cooperation and preparedness, and science all have to come together.
James Chau
COVID-19 impacts us all, but some of us in very acute ways, others to far greater extents. Who do you find yourself thinking about while you're at home and you have this space, this mental space, to reflect in a different way?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
Like so many things in the world, the impacts are so different across society. Poor people, people without shelter, people living in homeless centers, people that have no option but to go out and work even in dangerous circumstances, people who are on the frontlines, nurses and doctors, and hospital orderlies, and ambulance drivers. They're absolutely at the frontline of this battle. Our job, for those of us who are safer and sheltered, is to make sure first that we hail the heroism of those who are in the frontlines, and second that we do everything possible to keep them safe, and to bring this pandemic under control in the fastest possible way with everybody protected to the maximum extent possible. So, this is a moral obligation for all of us to think how can we, as citizens or as individuals, do the most we can to help bring this scourge under control.
James Chau
You are probably if not one of the most important global architects of our time. Presidents, Prime Ministers, Secretary Generals, they come and go, but you're the constant through them. you design the Millennium Development Goals. Of course, you're key to the Sustainable Development Goals, we've come to feel safe in your hands and in your ambitions. But realistically now with COVID-19, do you think we have to realign the SDGs and perhaps to rewrite what we can expect of the world when it's being put through new stresses that some people are not ready for?
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
I'm not the architect of these because these are global goals. But I'm a big believer in having global goals, and so I have devoted my career to trying to achieve what we say we want to achieve. What really ticks me off is when we say we want to do something and then don't try to do it. It's not easy to achieve big goals of ending poverty, or protecting the environment, or ending a pandemic. These are not simple matters, but these are important objectives, and we have so much talent in the world, so much knowledge, technology, so much goodwill, so much desire of humanity to have a decent life for themselves, and especially for their children and their families and their loved ones. We have the means to address these issues and that I think has to be our abiding purpose. It's how I view matters that day to day, which is we can do it, we want to do it, we need to do it. So, what's missing today? What can we do today, to add another piece of that jigsaw puzzle so that we're really completing the full picture and getting the job done? That's how I tend to think of this from morning till night: what can we do today to add to the solutions.
James Chau
Jeffrey Sachs, it's an honor speaking with you at this critical time.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs
Thank you very much for what you're doing, and sharing the global discussion, and promoting the understanding of the US and China which is so vital, because if these two great countries - with so much capacity - cooperate together, think of how much can be solved in the world.
Closing
The China Current continues its special coverage on the coronavirus outbreak. Go to our social media @TheChinaCurrent and our website for interviews, videos, and podcasts. I'm James Chau. Thank you.
Part 1 | Solving Problems Together
https://chinacurrent.com/story/19776/solving-problems-together-jeffrey-sachs-the-novel-outbreak
Part 2 | We Must Defend Multilateralism
https://chinacurrent.com/story/19777/we-must-defend-multilateralism-jeffrey-sachs-the-novel-outbreak
Part 3 | Achieving Global Goals
https://chinacurrent.com/story/19778/achieving-global-goals-jeffrey-sachs-the-novel-outbreak