"There is no more important act -- as history will judge it -- than China and the USA cooperating together to meet this challenge." -- Lawrence H. Summers

LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS Spoke at the launching ceremony of Institute for Global Health and Development, Peking University (PKU-iGHD) and the Beijing Forum 2020: COVID-19 Shocks to Global Health and Development:

Thank you very much. It's a great privilege to be invited to participate in this forum. I only wish that circumstances made it possible for me to be in Beijing and engage in dialogue at Peking University and with many Chinese colleagues, and I am honored by the invitation to appear on this panel with people who have done such profoundly important work in the global health area like Victor J. Dzau, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and so many others. And I think it's an important and welcome time for China to be sponsoring a global dialogue of this kind.

I want to begin by telling a historical story that has come to light only in the last few years. In 1985, President Reagan and the new premier of Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev, set out to have their first meeting. It took place in Geneva. They discussed many different subjects. At the time the two nations were quite implacably opposed to one another. At one point in a kind of thing that drives the staffs of heads of state crazy, President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev announced they were going for a walk by Lake Geneva accompanied by their translators. They talked about whatever they talked about, and then suddenly, with a smile on his face, at least as the story is told, President Reagan said to Premier Gorbachev: if we were attacked by aliens from outer space, would you help by coming to our defense? And Mikhail Gorbachev smiled and said: of course, yes. And he asked President Reagan, if we, the Union of Soviet socialist republics were attacked by aliens from outer space, would you come to our defense? And President Reagan, the coldest of cold warriors, said that, yes, of course he would come to the Soviet Union's defense. They agreed that they would come to each other's defense and that they would also in that scenario collaborate in defense of all of humanity.

Now, why do I tell this story? Invasions by aliens from outer space are the stuff of fantasy and fiction. But invasion by microbes from our planet into our bodies is the stuff of current reality. The pandemic threat that we have been living with for the last year, like the pandemics that have defined so much of history, are as close as reality comes to a common threat that transcends international borders, it transcends political systems, it transcends nations, it transcends any kind of human boundary. And like that hypothetical invasion from outer space reminds us of our common humanity.

It doesn't just remind us of our common humanity, it demands a collective response. Because if we know anything, it is that a problem of this kind cannot be contained anyplace unless it is contained every place.

In an increasingly interdependent world, there is no walling off for a long period of time and certainly not permanently, a contagious micro like that representative by COVID-19. And so this is as profound a challenge as we have faced to the pro-capacity for international cooperation. And make no mistake, the stakes are immense.

David Cutler and I made an estimate of the long-run total costs to the American economy of COVID-19 several months ago. Our estimate was $16 trillion. If that estimate is roughly right for the United States, it would suggest costs to the global economy on the order of $75 trillion or $80 trillion. That dwarfs the cost of wars the United States has fought, just as the premature death from COVID-19 will dwarf the costs of loss of life from the military conflicts the United States has fought for the last 75 years.

The scale of those economic costs are in a range where comparisons with the next 50 years of climate change costs. The latest studies of the science suggest that the sequelae for those who survive COVID may in cumulative magnitude be comparable to the immediate mortality costs. And we are reminded by the events of the last week, that the longer this disease circulates and circulates at scale, the greater is the possibility of mutation and the greater is the risk of the development of more deadly or more contagious or both variants of the virus.

There is, I would suggest, no responsible or moral course with respect to pandemic threats than the kind of intense cooperation that President Reagan and President Gorbachev had in mind.

I think two things have to be said in this regard. The first is we have not seen intense global cooperation at the government level so far. There has been no events in the economic or in the health realm that approaches the conference that took place in the early stage of the great financial crisis in March of 2009, nor has there been the kind of global coming together that has taken place in Rio or in Copenhagen or in Paris or in any number of places around global climate change. Collective efforts so far, has been small compared to the separate domestic efforts.

The other thing that I believe, as we said, is that if there is or is not to be a successful, effective, strong global collective effort with respect back to pandemic threat，it will depend on the United States and on China far more than any other two countries. US president Reagan and Soviet President Gorbachev were able to set aside their differences, their legitimate grievances in both directions and there are many in order to meet this threat to the basic health of their citizens and to the basic health of humanity.

These two questions will I suspect along centrally when the history of next few years is written by historians, 25 or 50, or possibly even 250 years from that. What is necessary? There are others on this panel who can speak with more commends of detail than I.

I would suggest three overarching principals.

First, financing that assures the rapid availability of vaccination for everyone on this planet, if I will suggest a goal of vaccination universally available and administrable by the end of 2022.

It fights believes that global economic system that can ensure universal availability of cell phones and smartphones cannot provide universal availability of vaccination. This is not an act of charity from rich countries to poor, it is an act a forward defense of national self-interest in a world where that virus can mutate, and mutate dangerously, lethally at any time in each place.

The second priority is a common global commitment to restore convergence between developing countries and traditional industrial countries. For many years, for the first half roughly -- a period after the second world war, the world's story was a divergence. Rich countries grew faster than poor countries, meaning more and more global inequality. The most important thing that has happened in history over the last 40 years is that that divergence trend has been replaced by a convergence trend. When I talk to students, they find it remarkable and inconceivable that I was taught as a student in the 1970s, that there was a real possibility, indeed, in the view of many taught me in a real likelihood，a global famine would involve Asians before the end of the 20th century. It was not something to be taken for granted that a process of convergent would begin, but no place more prominently than in China, it did begin and with staggering results and benefits for humanity.

A child born in a world today is half as likely to die before the age of five, as a child born in 1990. Dean Jemison and I extrapolated lately some time ago, it was possible to believe that on a global basis, child mortality rates by the mid-2030s, would be where they were in the United States when I was a child.

Those kinds of achievements are staggering. But they are at risk，if Its pattern of convergence gives a way back to a pattern of diverges. What must be done to prevent it? Very broadly, there must be a very substantially enhanced flow of resources from the global north to the global south. That is a task that involves opening markets and keeping them open. That is a task that should engage international financial institutions, in a far larger places which they have been engaged to date. That is a task that must involve the realistic treatments of debts of countries that are overwhelming by the COVID challenge.

With economic growth, it comes the resilience, that prevents over coming threat and the growth towards economy and humanity that all desire. It is not an assured on current trend.

A third great challenge that I would emphasize is the establishment of an effective global capacity to meet the next Pandemic. There are experts much more able to discuss the difference viruses and microbes than I. There is the nature of random evolutionary processes that produce pandemic that they cannot be entirely productive. I am convinced that the return time for a grave threat on the order of COVID, it's quite possibly less than 20 years, and that the model of this kind of global threat as a once a century event, in an increasingly interdependent world is profoundly wrong, that maybe more right to think of us as having in hand a number of near misses in the last 20 years, which would suggest a much greater risk of return.

That suggests the absolute imperative of international investments in monitoring populations, sharing data, and maintaining inventories of productive and protective equipment and rapid capacity to produce on protective equipment, and vaccines. It is from a certain perspective a miracle that we were able to produce a vaccine this time around as rapidly as we were. But there is no reason why next time we cannot have substantially more rapid.

It's just going to require not just international cooperation, but it is going to require something that is very difficult for political figures, investment, or unknown beneficiaries. When it is clear, and the victims are before us, it is much easier to mobilize the political will to help, than when the threat is certain, but as yet unformed. And yet, the payoff is so high, If the next time we have a COVID, a response can be even weeks, well lone month faster.

And so, my message to you as an American speaking at an important Chinese forum, is that these are challenges that can be met. And this generation, as preoccupied as it is with so many valid concerns, can muster a spirit of global cooperation. There is no more important act -- as history will judge it -- than China and the United States cooperating together to meet this challenge. Thank you very much.