[Music]
[Applause]
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oh somebody's there
look at the cameras
hello and welcome to the global
perspectives on
fighting the chronovirus pandemic my
name is sarah wheaton i'm the chief
policy correspondent with politico
europe
and i'm joined here today by carl bilt
he is the former prime minister of
sweden and now the
special envoy for the act accelerator
which he will tell you a little bit more
about
later joining us from london is sir suma
chakrabarti he is the former president
of the european bank for reconstruction
and development
and i have marco chadesh here he is the
president of the
chamber of commerce for the republic of
serbia so thank you for joining us
thanks to all of you who are here in the
room in bratislava with us and thanks to
everybody who
is watching online whether you're in the
room or
joining us online you can ask questions
using the globesec app
um or if you're in the room at some
point i'll give you a chance to raise
your hand and somebody will come around
with
a big socially distanced mic and and
stick it in your face so that you can
ask a question
and and do you think of those questions
now um if you wait until the very end
to to take an opportunity then uh then
we might not get to your question
um and actually on that note to kind of
help everybody
get used to using the app um whether
you're online or not
um let's go ahead and and do a poll
this is your chance to weigh in to give
a review to europe
of how well it has handled the
coronavirus
pandemic so hopefully we can pull that
up for you
so how would you rate the eu's
performance on supplying vaccines
to eu citizens one is so one you know
it's on a scale of one to five so one is
terrible
and uh five would be excellent so go
ahead and
and weigh in and we'll we'll get back to
the results a little bit a little bit
later
um but um for now let's let's kick off
just actually looking at what happened
over the weekend the g7 met and uh
they announced that um they will be
donating
870 million vaccines to poorer countries
over the next 12 months meanwhile as our
presence here can attest
things are getting back to normal uh in
in wealthier countries and so um
suma actually let me let me start with
you over in london
you know what what do you make of this
870 million dose commitment is that is
that going to solve the problem
thanks very much sarah and nice to see
carl and marco as well
um i'm actually in oxford not london but
anyway
i'll forgive you for that um but look
it's a start but it's nowhere near
enough frankly this in terms of vaccine
sharing
we know all the analysis including by my
organization odi says that
we've really got the vaccination rates
up in the global south in order to solve
what is a global problem
and that requires both more vaccine
financing
vaccine sharing and work on vaccine
production too
but on the sharing side um look what the
g7 announced i think is
helpful but it's way way short of what
the imf or the independent panel on
pandemic preparedness
uh and response are saying is needed a
long way short and of course
with the syrian institute in india the
largest producer of vaccines also
only producing for domestic abuse to the
end of this year
the gap is enormous so i'm afraid i
don't really think this is
going far enough to solve the problem we
have
carl what's what's your take is it i
mean how do we
how do we get where we need to be no i
fundamentally
fundamentally agree i mean 870 i'm not
quite certain it was 870 that remains to
be seen there's always
a pledging conference of this sort
there's always an element of double
accounting
and delivery is what counts and delivery
is needed not next year but this year
these months in order to get it under
control
what we need really to bring the
pandemic under control by next year
is in the order of 11 billion doses
we have now so far roughly 2.1 billion
doses
that have been administered around the
world 80 85
of them in the witcher world if you take
the uh
low-income countries 0.2 percent
of people have been vaccinated there and
as we have learned
the problem if we go around in
bratislava or stockholm and belgrade
and think that the issue is solved
that is not the case now we are dealing
with the delta
variation i think that is going to be
dominant all over europe within weeks
because it is very much more contagious
than the previous ones
and i'm quite certain that if the
pandemic continues to
rage in wherever in the world peru is
among the worst at the moment
there will be new variations and these
don't know any borders they spread very
fast
so that is why it's so extremely urgent
to get vaccines and diagnostics and
treatments out to every
corner of the world because until
everyone is safe
no one is safe we are not saved in
practice larva
until we are safe in bangalore or
botswana or whatever
in the world so d7 lots of words
some promises good start but much more
is needed
thanks carl the other factor that we've
been seeing though is countries seem to
be a little unsure about whether
to give through kovacs which
is a mechanism set up by the by the
world health organization by gavi that
says
they will give to kind of distribute
vaccines equally around the world
um prioritizing health workers
prioritizing need on the other hand
many countries have said look maybe
we're ready to give away vaccines or or
sell vaccines but
we maybe want to get a little something
out of it ourselves we have some
diplomatic priorities and so vaccine
diplomacy has also emerged
and and marco serbia has has been
arguably a beneficiary of this uh you
know is vaccine diplomacy a good thing
or a bad thing
yeah that is really the case but if you
look at
the picture you know we are we were very
good
as a as a civilization to develop the
vaccine
which can efficiently with antibodies
fight the virus
but we are as a civilization as a world
society
so failing to reach
the same in the structural and
international and the policy levels
where we actually actually do whatever
we have done we have done
more or less wrong if you see serbia of
course
serbia as a non-eu member still and
with the opportunities to to to fight on
on our own as a small country with a
very simple decision-making process with
not
bureaucratic administration it was not
so
hard but it was not so hard because
the world as the global place the world
politics made
out of this actually a street fight to
be a street fighter
as a small country to be a street
fighter
fighter which is hands are not tied
it's much easier so actually what you
have
have done in serbia is that we started
many many months ago so year and a half
ago to to look
into the producers and to talk with them
directly to approach them to buy the
vaccines
at that time we had of course our talks
with the european union with the
decision makers in european union
and we saw how it gonna lead and how the
process will
will go so we said okay let's do it
everywhere because you know virus again
biologically if you see the virus is
coming to your lungs
then the antibodies attacks virus in the
lungs
if you see that we have a delta virus in
india
politically structurally you are not
attacking the india case
you're you're totally de-blocking the
the the
world parts which are the most infected
and this is you know that's what i'm
saying you know maybe we need more
biologists now leading the world than
the politicians
but the politicians have made some
interesting choices
with with regard to serbia we've seen
russia send quite a few vaccines in
we've seen china especially
supply vaccines how have you seen that
effect affect uptake both within serbia
and within the region as well
so basically what we would what the good
decision was is to say okay where we can
reach the next sense there's a chinese
there's russians
sputnik synonym there is astrazeneca
there is a pfizer
there is a moderna and you could as a
citizens in serbia
and later on the citizens of the region
you can choose
which vaccine you want to take and
dependent on this
it could be take one week or two weeks
or one month
until you are ready to be vaccinated and
that was a good
decision because you know the virus is
not
you know synovox or sputnik or astra
virus is a virus
so we have to we have to defeat him what
we then
discovered is that alone vaccinating
ourselves
in serbia is actually good but it's not
not preventing us it's not
helping us a lot let's do tried to do to
spread it on the on the region
so we organized as a chamber of commerce
uh vaccination of the business people
and then later of the old citizens from
the regional
uh of the western balkans but also from
croatia from bulgaria
anywhere so basically for us it was most
important
let's do that vaccinate as more people
as we can
to help and to start to live normally
we are not a part again of the european
structures
as much as we wanted to do to be so we
we have no
institutional umbrellas financial
umbrellas that they can
give us injection of money and and
capital and you know to overbridge the
situation we had to find
we were you know forced to find our own
way and this is maybe in this situation
good but this is the crisis situation
we now have to see how we can reach out
and
rebuild the the institutions what are we
what are the multilateral
resolutions are doing what do we need
for the climate change for the next
pandemic so and i'm very very thankful
to mr bilt who is now really
shaking the structures and this is what
we needed two years ago
three not now but maybe five years ago
but okay
nevertheless now thank you carl for that
so
really to shake up and to see people
it's not
about it's not about playing the games
it's not about playing the geopolitical
ngo strategy with the lives of billions
of people
carl no um
serbia has done it relatively rare i
sort of i freely acknowledge that no
question about it but
it doesn't really help serbia but it
doesn't help the world and and in my
opinion there's no way we can sort this
out in serbia
know where we can sort it out in in
europe we need to sort it out in the
world yeah
and and actually we need the global
institutions and i'm
i've ne to be quite honest i've never
been dealing seriously with these issues
before i've been dealing with things
like the balkans and
russians and god knows what that's a
mess in itself so we skipped that
a couple of months ago dr tedros called
me the director general of the world
health organization and said call i need
your help and i said well me
yeah i need someone who needs something
about international affairs and you
should now be
helping me to coordinate act a and i
said what's that day well act a
was set up april of last year by the
d70 and these 20 sorry
and and the eu in order to because at
that time they said
gosh something is happening we need to
get
everyone around the table so we set up a
coordinating mechanism
that brings together sort of the big
multinational actors the world health
organization primarily
but also the world trade organization
which is key in these particular
respects
then we have a lot of other actors like
sort of
garvey the vaccine alliance public
private safety that is developing
vaccines infide that is doing
diagnostics
big private actors i mean we have some
private global superpowers like gates
and
welcome all of these in a coordinating
network
never been done before and we meet every
week to say
this is what to do this is the challenge
this is what we're trying to do
yesterday we have announced an agreement
with the two leading manufacturers of uh
medical oxygen in the world to produce
an additional 2.2
million i think cylinders of oxygen
every day
because if if people that get oxygen
they die
they die and we've seen them dying in
numbers in india in latin america
in nepal and and then you bring everyone
around the table manufacturers
and ngos and government and try to do
that
has this been successful so far not well
it has been successful in the sense that
we've done a lot
um but i'm cautioning everyone we are
not
even at the midpoint of this particular
pandemic
and we don't know what's around the
corner
because we are not we are fighting a
living enemy
that is moving that is adapting that is
changing
and we know what we are fighting today
perhaps
we are not testing enough in my opinion
so it might be that there is something
that we have even today that we don't
know
but we can be fairly certain that we're
going to fight something else
three months from now and then we need
to have the
preparedness at the same time as we are
doing these things i'm not going to talk
too long but
we are starting to think of what happens
say that we by the end of next year
or in a good situation then we need to
think
are we really entering a new age of
pandemics because this might have been
the worst it was the worst
but we've had a number of them during
the last 20 years starting with source
we tend to forget that but we had a
number of them
and we didn't have action so is this
going to be the beginning of an age
epidemics
or are we going to be ready to set up
the international other institutions to
make sure that
we can prevent new pandemics and that's
going to be a very
major global challenge but first we have
to overcome this one
zuma i see i see you've been itching to
weigh in
politics is alive and kicking in the
vaccine
field as well i'm afraid the g7
committed
to support an act accelerator-led
process
to coordinate global vaccine supply
network and to try and optimize actually
manufacturing capacities but it's
completely short on concrete commitments
uh these g7 haven't got any concrete
commitments on this
and it's urgent to tackle those
bottlenecks in supply chain
of the pharma sector and expand
manufacturing capacity
uh worldwide secondly i mean i i'll read
your quote from the us
uh and run up to the g7 it said it was
going to use the g7 to rally the world's
democracies around solving this crisis
globally with america leading the way to
create the arsenal of vaccines
well uh what i note is the world's
biggest democracy india is
unable to export at all at the moment uh
to the end of the year
china has ramped up production of its
vaccines towards i think nearly 500
million a month
now and it's going to become the world's
largest vaccine producer
and may be actually able to supply
significant vaccine numbers
from far sooner than g7 and there won't
be explicit conditionality in this there
doesn't have to be
uh simply the fact that in an emergency
your sources of vaccine are coming very
much from a country like china
will make leaders of emerging markets
wake up take notice
realize who's supporting them in the
moment of crisis
the fundamental problem in this is what
serbia has done what the uk has done
what sweet everyone has done
is actually very rational at a national
level
but it's not rational globally that's
the problem we've got
so what we've failed to do i think is
align
the self-interest with the collective
global interest
and you saw that in the g7 summit i
think as well um
and you know i come from a country that
you know
decided to do a brexit uh despite the
economic consequences so i'm not going
to appeal just to the economic
arguments uh i think things like
lifestyle changes
for all of us in the advanced countries
will come unless we can get
vaccines shared properly with the global
south and that's what
carl i think and marco also say that's
the case that politicians in the
advanced countries need to make
to their populations and so far not
really being made
thanks and and you make a really
interesting point because we've been
hearing
this mantra that nobody is safe until
everybody is safe but
i think again we we all here who are
physically in this room
um see some of you in the audience
sitting close to each other not
necessarily
wearing masks we all we all seem to feel
pretty safe
and we look back at the aids epidemic as
well there's sort of a case was made 20
years ago
that this type of inequality was not
acceptable
and yet we seem to be back in in the
same place again so
are we gonna are we gonna start from
square one with every pandemic
carl well there's a risk of that but
that needs to be avoided
as you said i mean we had sauce we had
aids we had ebola we had h1 n1 we had
mers
there were as a matter of fact 11
different international high level
panels in order to say things are coming
prepare yourself
and the last and most significant of
them issued his report in november of
2019
one month before i hadn't read it
i was not even aware of it i was not in
positional responsibility at the time
but anyhow
i doubt there was any prime minister in
the world that had read that particular
report but if you read it in afterwards
it's it's all there it it's acid that
means that we need need to prepare much
better
uh in order to be ready for the next
because they're
quite a number of structural factors
that make it more likely that these
things will happen again
in terms of population explosion and
interaction between humans and animals
and
climate change and so so it's sort of
it's moving towards a world of pandemic
if we don't get a word
of much more intensify global
cooperation on global health issues
i'm saying that as a person who never
dealt with these issues i wasn't aware
of them before dealt with the classical
security of a global sick type
um but when we see these things
happening
i mean we have i don't know how many
have we 4 million dead
i i think the official figure is around
three million but that's a gross
underestimated we have fifteen thousand
dead in my country
and um and we still been lucky
because if we compare with sauce in 2003
this is far less deadly
far less deadly more contagious
but if we were to get something that is
as deadly as source and as contagious as
corvid
then we are in deep much much deeper
trouble
than we are today and it could well
happen if we don't learn the lessons
thanks carl marcos we you know you're
the president of the serbian chamber of
commerce
business thrives on stability obviously
this was deeply
destabilizing you know how how are
companies preparing for this
uh going forward so i think the
companies are now
much quicker and smarter than the
complicated complicated structures of
institutions if you see
more and more corporations are
introducing
obligationary vaccination in their
system so you cannot work
sorry if you're not vaccinated the
companies
if you see everybody is commenting about
a lot of
stocks buybacks from the companies it's
not only because of the cash
it is because of the preparation of the
vulnerable world
so of course as a company i am
considered consolidating my
equity to be able to cope with the new
challenges something which is really
really
logical uh thinking the companies are
also redefining how they trade
redefining the logistical networks uh
very very
quickly uh the states the governments on
the other side
are helping a lot of course in the
structure to to to help
to pump the money to to to make the
the crisis less dangerous that that is
but the answers of how we will cope the
next
stage there are no answers so if you if
you look just you look as a europe as a
company
so let let us let us forget this is
structure let us think about european
continent as a company
what do we have as depth ebitda ratio
huge
what do we have as our social expanders
and costs more
than any other company if we see china
and asia
if we see united states or other
companies
we will the economic dynamic of asia is
much stronger and much
livid than than european it will the
outcome of the asian economy will
surpass europe in a few years
uh if we continue to work like this
technologically competitiveness
we are lacking behind asia we are
lacking behind usa
if you see education look overview the
list of the educational institutions
and the top ratings you will find maybe
uk
okay but that's it in the european
continent you will not find
the biggest and the more you know top
ranking
top ranking institutions what is about
the fintech what is about so
there is a lot of issues where i will
ask carl are you
ready to invest as a company in europe
as a company if you be
investor i don't know i think we need
a strong investment fund which will come
to europe
and and you know restructure ourselves
because i'm talking this
as somebody who is still not a member of
you but very integrated
very very integrated in the european
economy you can be eu or you cannot be
you but you are part of your community
economical network economical network of
europe
and i tell you this looking from this
down
you know a smallest fish i see really
all the problems
that we are now facing and this is not
easy to solve and this is how what we
have to rethink
and this is not only about
redistribution of vexes we have to think
uh about technologies we nobody sells
okay how the our large we as a europe we
are
company which is oriented as exporter
you agree so we have to export
to other markets to big markets to other
companies as india for example
we have to export to africa we have to
export to china we have to export to
united states
and how they will cope these markets
with their challenges are we helping are
we not having technology
vintage uh distribution of predictions
of uh and
and introducing of uh ai technologies in
these countries
uh healthcare digital healthcare so
these are the questions that we also
have to deliver
and to export to these markets in order
to have these markets
in the same capacity that we want to
have them because we depend on these
markets
we want to admit it or not but we depend
on it
well if europe is a business uh we all
had our chance to do our our yelp our
google review
in our slido poll so let's um let's see
the results of of uh
how folks feel europe did all right
very very middling there's strong
consensus that uh
that you have had a mediocre performance
on supplying vaccines to eu citizens um
so um for we're about about midway
through so
um i'll i'll check with the audience to
to
see if there are any questions um in the
room
all right i don't see any um
so reminder to to get your questions
ready here or
submit a question on slido
but zuma let me
let me ask you we one of the discussions
that came up um
uh uh made especially articulately by
the the croatian president earlier
today is this idea that a lot of these
restrictions
were imposed um
the health restrictions were imposed
without necessarily a lot of consent
from the populist it might have been
you know driven by experts not
necessarily done in some sort of
authoritarian pursuit but
you know how how do these
these restrictions affect um
economies and and kind of the citizens
relationship to their economies
well what we've been seeing for last 15
months as a classic
liberty versus safety uh argument and
you get this
during war time and you also get this in
this current situation
and um each countries had to make its
own decisions on this but clearly the
economic impact has been enormous
um you know uh just across every single
um advanced economy but all the
middle-income countries that i know of i
think only
two of the ones that we used to work on
they've actually managed positive growth
are rather surprising uzbekistan being
one of them
but like plus one percent or something
compared with their target was plus 10.
so basically the world economy has been
very badly hit and one of the
big issues is how quickly we'll recover
there will obviously be a bounce back
immediately but there'll be interesting
issues like supply chains
haven't been disrupted whether people
will go more local
rather than uh you know global
with a chinese uh participation in those
global supply chains will also be you
know one of the issues that
countries face up to lots of interesting
questions
i think the thing we haven't discussed
and i would like to put it on the table
is institutional change i think we've
talked about vaccine sharing financing
and so on
but a big issue for me it seems to me
and it's one that i'm working on as part
of the wh sho
pan european commission it's uh chaired
by mario monti the former
italian prime minister is looking at
what sort of institutional change do we
need for exactly what carl said
this is not going to be the last
pandemic this will come back if you
model all the others
they all came back in somewhere another
and so how do we risk the
reduce the risk of future pandemics and
combat them more effectively
as it happens we have got lessons from
other global public bands
like climate change like the financial
crisis
uh we did make institutional change in
case of climate it took
more than 20 years from the stockholm
summit in 72 to the rio 1 in 92
before changes started happening
financial crisis actually responded
much more quickly so what we're going to
recommend almost certainly
in this primary operating commission is
first of all we do need an international
scientific committee
on health threads modeled on the climate
change scientific committee
we do need to improve and strengthen the
surveillance of health systems
which probably means more of a
compulsory
involvement by wh so bit like the imf's
article 4
surveillance to look at health systems
and to look at their linkage with food
and agriculture animal health
those sorts of things and there was some
element of this in the g7
declaration actually which is that part
of it was welcome i think this weekend
um we also should create in our view a
g20 global health board modeled on the
financial stability board
um this would identify failures in the
provision of
global goods like vaccines and so on
and help with preparedness and response
as well
and also we need to ramp up investment
in global public goods for example
reasons marco said
uh this is actually it's really
interesting if you look at really
interesting worrying
if you look at multiple development
banks like the one i lay dbrd
the amount of financing in the in this
area is very low
actually relative to other types of
global goods
uh so i you know we're thinking that we
should recommend that kovacs
becomes a permanent mechanism that uh
much more investment in health systems
in r d and innovation
by the multilateral development banks
and others
that i think has to accompany
institutional change
otherwise the new institutions won't
have the firepower to deal with these
things so we'll have to have a duality
of
institutional change and reform modeled
on climate change and financial crisis
but dealing with pandemics plus huge
scale up of investment from multilateral
organizations in particular
to help particularly emerging markets uh
cope with this in future
seem if i could just push back on you a
little bit kovacs has not really been
seen as a success so far so
why should we make it permanent well
because it needs to become a success
it's not the
it's not the fault of the actual model
in my view it's i'm afraid it's the
issue with um the main financiers of the
model
and the suppliers it's uh so it's a
mechanism
that uh i think it's gonna have to
mature and succeed but i think it can do
provided its uh key participants
actually
really commit to doing so over a long
period they might find it easier to
commit over a longer period
than over the short term because of
their own fiscal issues
so that's why i think it's the best game
in town i think we should build on it
carl do you do you agree do you think it
will be easier to make the longer term
case and
and have you figured out a pitch that
will that will convince
um uh other european and and
and the other european countries in the
u.s to to pony up more
well i i hope that we can get them to
sort of contribute more
immediately in terms of money and
vaccine sharing that remains to be seen
but that that that is ongoing work but
then i very much agree with whom are
there sort of the agenda that he spells
out
and i i can add quite a lot to it on
what is
needed to do thereafter in order to set
up new international mechanisms i mean
we need a sort of
they're quite a number of reports on the
table already
and and we're going to have a special
session of the world health assembly in
november
to deal with these issues in pandemic
treaty and a sort of pandemic radar or
surveillance systems and financial
resources immediately available so we
can order vaccines
not after three months but after three
days
so that we can fully fund or supply the
korvax i mean korvax is an excellent
idea
but i mean if you should distribute
vaccines you need to have vaccines
and and even if we are now ramping up
production of vaccines like sort of a
historical
dimensions we face a lot of problems
i mean we fade trade restrictions we
fail in the face vaccine nationalists
we've
placed some supply constraints so there
are lots of lessons to be learned in the
middle of us dealing with crisis
management as we are doing on a
daily or weekly basis in order to fight
this
we need to sort of start to add up the
long agenda the long list of things
that needs to be done and decided next
year
when we hopefully are in a better
situation to prevent this from
from recurring and that europe plays a
role needless to say
uk is an important actor not only
because of g7 but there's
other reasons as well china
russia i mean we all of the other
battles that we fight
must be sort of put aside for the battle
against the virus
and setting up those particular
structures
that's a great segue actually to to one
of our
one of our questions that came in
through through the app um
and uh it's from i'm so sorry i'm gonna
mispronounce this name
uh nanada nezhevsky
i'm sorry i seriously apologize but
anyway the question is
vaccine manufacturers do not want to
share vaccine production with others and
invoke the right to patent protection
but is it actually some kind of monopoly
that's in my opinion wrong they are
sharing vaccine production
on a i don't have the numbers but i
think we have 20 or 30 or 40
technology sharing agreements i mean
most of production is outsourcing to
other
vaccine manufacturing at the moment the
problem that is there
is often a problem now of sort of
manpower
of uh sufficient quality control if you
do it it's too fast
you lose i mean these are complicated
things
i mean it's not that you do it at home
in the kitchen to put it mildly
uh one sort of
stock of vaccines that you do takes
roughly three months it's a biological
process
you have a hundred quality checks and if
things go wrong as we saw at
example at a big facility in baltimore
everything is destroyed and there will
be tens and tens of millions of
doses that also destroyed in that
particular
small mistake in baltimore but we have
sort of outsourced vaccine production
all over the world
with the speed that is unprecedented if
we take this sort of
intellectual property issue that could
be discussed
but that's going to take a long time to
have an effect
i mean if if one lifts those particular
protections
and start to build greenfield factories
for vaccine production start to recruit
and train people
you will have an effect in on supply in
say two years time
that's nice in two years time
i'm not going to say that we're all
going to be dead but that's to
exaggerate but i mean it's it's it's now
that we need it and then we have to deal
as donald rumsfeld said you have to
fight the war of the day with the army
that you have
and we have to fight this particular
pandemic with the
the instruments that we have marco you
want to
weigh in after we've heard the words of
the uh former george w bush's defense
secretary
go ahead no i i just wanted to say that
you know
i think the best recommendation for carl
for this new job was that he you know
has to deal with balkans you know if you
can't deal with balkans the viruses
nothing
so basically maybe who knows but but i
totally i totally agree with that i
would
what i think is that
if you i'm happy that political leaders
in my country president and prime
minister
they told out of the box and they was
able to
to think out of the box but i'm not a
happy man if this is not
leading to improving the box because you
know
it's it's not a good game uh thinking
out of the box is always good
if you have the box so let us think
about the box and then
if you see the 80s uh you know the last
century
i i totally remind me the whole
vaccination uh
race is is actually and not only
vaccination but the whole corona race
is actually reminding me on the 80s and
trying to settling the arm race we
need to deal like this we need to sit
down and say hey international rules
has to be established if i want to build
a factory in any of country
including serbia for the production i
will
have to fight with the same building
permits bureaucracy
as anywhere in the world and it will not
you know who cares if it is for the
vaccine of its
for for anything else i will have to
fight the old bureaucratic issues if i
want to go
to testing and so on so we have to to
find international rules
which are obliged for everybody and that
is not the case
and not a question if you're in china or
in russia or in the states
but we you know this is the only way to
to
to scope with that and this is actually
improving the box
i think so so this is basically what we
need
really to think about it how we will
manage it to rebuild the box
in the way that you know we are able to
do to face the challenges
because they are here we are not you
know this we are not speaking now it's
about something which is in the future
we are speaking about you know you see
the people with the masks and and
everything so
i i spent two and a half hours just to
come in
and to register for this you know i was
like zoom come back
everything is forgiven i like you so but
nevertheless we
we managed it somehow and now i think we
have to if we tend to really really
think about how we will do it in the
future and
you know there are a lot of questions
how
will the industry 40 look like in the
future
are we able to transfer the technologies
to other markets which are not able on
themselves
to have these solutions now it's not
only
vaccine patents rise it's i totally
agree with the
this is the the framework of now but
what is the framework do we have an
answer of this framework do we have the
something that we we will exchange this
framework
i don't see this kind of discussion
all right i'm going to give um zuma the
floor and just give a heads up to
the folks um on the floor that we do
have a question um
there so uh let's get the the mic over
to that person
but but zuma can you can you weigh in
you know this discussion of a twit trips
waiver is
is is quite a fiery one and it was
implied by our last question
uh where do you stand there i'm in favor
of a waiver
um i think we've got to do everything we
can to get vaccine production up
and i think the waiver is a part of the
arsenal of instruments
to try and do that but carl's right um
in all wto discussions that i've ever
been involved with
um this is not like an overnight
decision to try and build a consensus
for that will take some months
and we haven't got months to wait so
that can only be one of the instruments
more a medium term one i think
all right thank you and let's go to our
question on the floor please
please stand up
border and coast guard uh thank you so
much uh european border or any border
management hasn't really been mentioned
so far
i was wondering about your perspectives
um
if we do accept that we're not even
halfway there we do also probably know
that
um more variants will come about where
does european border management come in
from the serbian perspective what does
that mean for your business or
the uk i mean we already have this
dynamic right now
thank you so much
well i think that uh if you talk about
sort of connectivity and we are a far
more connected world these days
i mean that we can manage that i mean
all of us most of us who have come here
or those of us who come by
by air for example i mean you have to
test before you go
on the aircraft and sometimes when you
get off the aircraft i mean that's
perfectly possible to do
and and and we have sort of new testing
equipment and new testing technologies
that are coming that are sort of
both easier to do and and cheaper
so i i think we can make the air traffic
global air traffic system
safer i mean nothing's hundred percent
but more or less hundred percent that's
that's doable um
borders i mean we have other flows of
migration across borders that we can't
control anyhow that
that's a challenge but uh the more
testing i
could make that note a lot of discussion
about vaccines i understand that all of
the politics is about vaccines
i stress testing testing testing because
if we don't test we are flying blind we
don't know what's happening
if we know what's happening then we can
take action so if we test
far more on your borders uh
then we know what's happening and that
we can take actions i i i'm not
entirely pessimistic on the possibility
to handle that challenge
if you ask about the borders and i will
return to my
company metaphor on the european
companies we
are becoming expensive our transaction
costs are becoming expensive
our logistical costs are becoming
expensive it
has not to do only with serbia or or
croatia
or or denmark it's about transaction
codes with the euro zones non-eurozones
between europe and non-eu countries or
emerging europe
it is the logistical cause between the
european countries
so uh basically what are the answers
from that so the businesses
what they can do is they can only do
what they can do
we are thinking about the new logistical
uh approaches
using more rivers using more vertical
harbors on the seaside
so trying to cope with these challenges
but again i don't see any discussion
how we will face this problem because it
will
shape our economy it will make us
uncompetitive
in the world where other large companies
have no problem with assessing the the
markets
everywhere in their on their part of the
of the of the
interest zone so basically this is a
huge question the borders are the huge
question
are we ready to introduce single markets
also to the countries
which are on their way to europe and
which are establishing the european
standards like the
western balkans minishang and everything
uh as a european union even before
the western balkans is able to become
politically full member
are we ready to do that or not i don't
know yeah i i
read a i read a piece that you wrote
recently where you kind of
saw vaccine diplomacy as a possible path
to
to creating this western balkans mini
schengen
how's that going and especially given
that kosovo has said
they don't want serbian vaccines because
most of the serbian vaccines are from
russia
and and china and china those countries
don't recognize kosovo as a country so
how are you navigating all this no i can
fully understand the people uh
you know that was the time when the the
government in krishna was
not even built and a pretty tough time
for them but
we had thousands of entrepreneurs from
kosovo
vaccinated in serbia the companies from
kosovo vaccinated in serbia
which is not a problem we are not
looking at as a as a political issue
it's a humanitarian issue
and you know this is the question if the
russians are
you have to choose nobody actually the
most given vaccine in this regional
business vaccination project that we had
is astrazeneca and beyond tech pfizer i
think
and then after that xenofarm so you
could choose
it's not a problem but diminishing in
the question of the region
will be solved so we will fail or we
will succeed together with the european
union
we can be achieved now in this hard
times to have
waiting times on the borders for trucks
under one hour
or one hour and a half and but in
between our
borders of the west balkan but if you
come to the
eu border this is eight hours 10 hours
12 hours
so there is no answer only between
us in the militia it is the answer
between us
and the single market are we ready to
that
are do we want to to to build the
project of european success
uh further or what we
want actually from europe i think this
basic
basic ideas and basic discussions what
we want from europe actually
is also somehow needed to be done
suma you talked about how how um
you know china and others are kind of
coming in with with offers
for this region so you know do you think
the pandemic has brought the western
balkans
uh closer to europe or further from
europe
and we only have a few minutes left so
western balkans
well i mean i hope it's brought western
balkans closer to europe um
but that's been my lifetime's uh
objective to try and get europe and the
western balkans much closer together
look i think um what marco has just said
is really instructive i think there's a
division between
goods and services if you like and
between physical non-physical i think
the physical side of
goods and services they're huge
transaction costs and probably the
pandemic is
actually increase those transaction
costs and the big focus should be on how
digitization others can actually reduce
those transaction costs
so that you know human beings less
involved in the actual transactions as
such
across borders on the non-physical i
think the service sector i think can
continue pretty much because it's well
digitized
and doesn't really require human to
human contact to some extent
the people side is going to be
interesting i think i don't know whether
lifestyle change will mean that there'll
be less tourism uh foreign tourism
for a while at least um because people
are suspicious
um you know even in the uk it's
remarkably easy
to get uh booking in portugal even when
it's not a green
green country um because people are just
not moving people are not just going
actually
as much as we thought they would and i
think also in terms of for work
whether people in europe are willing to
move around as much as they were
before it's a great benefit of the uk
economy in the past
you know where that's going to happen is
again in a rather open question
i think this is leading us inexorably
towards some sort of proof of um your
vaccine status
uh i think it's very difficult to avoid
it and it's another one of those liberty
versus control uh issues that's coming
up obviously
um but i can't see how our economy is
going to recover quickly unless we
resolve those sorts of issues
um in favor of entrepreneurs like marco
and others
actually to try and help them do their
business more easily
carl that that last question is has the
pandemic brought the western balkans
closer to europe or further
what would you say um i suspected that
we're going to end up in the balkans um
i mean welcome back
i hadn't thought about the issue but i
thought broadly speaking
yes uh because there will be an
awareness marker correct me
there will be an awareness of increasing
awareness in the balkans that sort of
the nation ain't enough i mean there's
been
i wouldn't say that balkans is the only
place where there's been a lot of
nationalists but there has certainly
been an abundance of it in the balkans
and now it's obvious that you you need
to it is something wider than that
so i think that the forces of
integration and cooperation broadly
speaking
will probably increase or have
greater possibilities in the balkans and
since the balkans
happens to be in europe um
so yeah on the balance i think it's
going to have a good effect
and then i hope by the way just to link
up to the previous discussion
what's going to happen with the economy
is of course slightly outside the topic
of our conversation
is because the digital development will
take us a giant leap forward
a giant leap forward that means that
young
people will take a giant leap forward
because young people are more
the big divide in the world is not
between
different geographic geographies is
between the different generations
and that means that sort of young people
in the balkans will probably take it
leap forward and
cooperate more across the whole
boundaries that's a
an optimistic take which i sort of
basically believe in
well carl people are going to think that
we choreographed this
because the next panel that is coming up
at 10 to 4
is on digital democracy so thank you for
that
excellent segue let's make that the last
word although i
am going to to quote marco uh for for my
summation
this hunger to improve the box maybe
great leaders in a crisis think outside
the box but i'm hearing
just as a major theme of this discussion
a desire to improve the box
um especially when it comes to kind of
international cooperation and
institutions
so thanks so much to you carl marco and
suma i really
appreciate you joining us thanks to you
here in in bratislava and those of you
watching digitally um
and if you're here with us uh there are
refreshments downstairs
see you at 3 50.
thank you thank you
thank you we sorted out everything
[Music]
you