National Post (National Edition)
The march to recovery needs to begin
Amidst all the gloom and doom and anguish about the COVID-19 pandemic, there is at least one ray of light — the prospect that the enormous effort underway to develop a vaccine may bear fruit by the end of this year. Significantly, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Director of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has become the oracle of record in Washington and has been denigrated by critics for his cautious forecasts, has endorsed the yearend target date “if things fall into place.”
The race to succeed with a vaccine is global. A White House task force “Operation Warp Speed” is determined to make hundreds of millions of doses available by January 2021. In the U.S., there are at least 115 projects running in companies and research labs. The Gates Foundation alone is sponsoring seven separate vaccine projects. Scientists at Oxford University have announced the most aggressive timeline, planning to make their vaccine available in the fall. Several other countries, including Canada, are in the hunt. As Carolyn Johnson observed in The Washington Post, “Researchers around the globe are trying to compress the timeline in ways never done before against a virus they have never successfully quelled.”
Some ethicists are expressing concern about “pandemic research exceptionalism” in which the demand for speed comes at the expense of solid testing evidence. Much still depends on how the outbreak evolves, how flexible regulators choose to be and what we continue to learn about the virus in real time. There are of course risks in proceeding too quickly on a vaccine, but risks are part of scientific recovery. To adapt a famous adage: Never let perfection be the enemy of the good.
But the promise of a vaccine earlier than anticipated is refreshing — a remarkable triumph of public- and private-sector collaboration, most notably in the U.S. It may be quite literally the shot in the arm needed to quash the doomsaying and restore confidence in our ability to move from mitigating the pandemic to a priority focus on economic recovery. Similarly encouraging breakthroughs are anticipated on treatments for the virus intended to reduce mortality rates.
In Canada, there needs to be a full post-mortem on several issues related to the pandemic, including:
❚ What went right and what went wrong in responding to COVID-19 and how did Canada’s performance compare with other countries?
❚ What was our state of readiness before the pandemic?
❚ Why did the Chinese government conceal essential data from late November to early January about the origin of the virus, information that would have enabled a more timely and effective global response?
❚ Was the WHO complicit in concealing early data from China and, if so, why did Canada decide to increase funding to the WHO before a full assessment of its conduct?
Obviously, there are important lessons to be learned, not least the extent to which speculative data and models fuelled more panic and excessive anxiety than logic, especially in the media, about the pandemic. There is a fine line between advice that consoles and messages or predictions that stoke confusion and anxiety.
Even more serious than the consequences from the pandemic itself is the devastating toll already taken on the global economy with declines in GDP and increases in unemployment that are already at Great Depression levels. What we do know is that the longer the lockdown prevails, the slower will be the recovery. Notions that a weak second quarter will start to turnaround in Q3 and deliver robust recovery in Q4, as the White House suggests, are conjectures based more on hope than analysis. Recovery is more likely to be difficult and drawn out. Small businesses are particularly vulnerable after two months of closure. Many will not survive, especially if the lockdown persists.
Canada must begin the march to recovery soon. If we insist on having a capacity to test and retest everyone or await complete information on how many are affected as a precondition for lifting restrictions, we will doom ourselves to a prolonged and deeper recession. We should move away from guidelines that presume all in every location are vulnerable and target specifically those who we know are the most vulnerable.
The easy part is dispensing seemingly limitless public funds to mitigate the damage to individuals and to sectors of the economy that are most negatively affected by a complete lockdown. The key question is how best to stimulate economic recovery without leading the country into insolvency. We need a strategic plan keyed to support sectors like energy (which Alberta needs now more than ever) and agriculture that are critical to our well-being, along with targeted industrial support that will provide greater self-sufficiency in such things as pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and meat processing. Infrastructure spending should also command a priority, especially for public health facilities to improve our capacity to cope with future pandemics and upgrades for shipping terminals and transportation networks that are needed to bolster recovery.
Not needed are indulgences in fads of the moment like aspirations for a greener economy, on which so much has already been spent. The severe economic downturn has already done more to reduce carbon emissions than all the government subsidies and green taxes combined.
Nor is it time for guaranteed-income schemes. With a debt load already nearing $1 trillion, Canada simply cannot afford such a program. The response to record claims for unemployment insurance in the U.S. (over 30 million and counting) demonstrated that a universal approach giving more money to some not to work than they had received while working suppresses the desire to return to work. Government handouts without incentives simply create demands for more of the same. The risk of going too far in that direction is that we will have more people riding in the wagon than pulling it — a surefire way to squelch the prospects for economic growth.
In order to temper growing regional tensions in Canada the plan should be national in scope and not tilted heavily to vote-rich Ontario and Quebec. A national emergency is no time for partisan bickering.
The government should assemble a council of the best and brightest minds from industry, science and finance to help chart the path forward. Above all, we need programs that serve the national interest, and confident political leadership to guide a solid recovery.
A NATIONAL EMERGENCY IS NO TIME FOR PARTISAN BICKERING.
National Post
A career Foreign Service officer for more than 30 years, Derek H. Burney is a former Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. and Chief of Staff
to Brian Mulroney.