John Micklethwait: May I begin with you, Prime Minister? What have you learned that is relevant to the rest of the world?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: First of all John, thank you for your kind words. Although when we talk about deaths, any statistic involving death is problematic. But what I learned personally, in my mind it is very obvious, we need to trust the experts, we need to trust the scientists. That’s what we did from the very beginning. We let them do the talking. We took decisions early.
We recognize that there is never such a perfect data set. There will always be some degrees of uncertainty, when dealing with such an epidemic. That is why I think we were successful. Overall we have managed this crisis well. We’ve had a second wave that hit us hard in November. We went into a hard lockdown, suffered the economic pain but we fully understood that you cannot return to any sort of economic normality unless you bring the epidemic under control.
So what we learned is to trust the scientists but also trust the people. When you communicate clearly with the people, Greeks have this reputation of not being particularly disciplined, but once we told them exactly what was happening and asked for their support, most of them if not all of them complied. We had very few anti-vaxxers, very few anti-maskers. Now that the masks are mandatory, everybody wears them.
We understand that if we are to return to a certain degree of normality before we vaccinate more than 50% of the population we need to stick to the basic measures. We know from the scientists, they told us that they do work. So, no rocket science is really involved. We need to go with what the experts tell us. And if you have to take a bold decision, especially if it is a painful one economically, make sure you take it early and use the time to build your healthcare system. We inherited a health care system which was very problematic. We doubled our ICU beds. Even that is not enough. Unless you proactively manage the epidemic.
John Micklethwait: From Greece’s point of view, I think you are one of these countries which has been talking about life returning to normal. Do you now feel that this level has been put back? When do you expect kind of normal activity to come?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: A lot will depend on the pace of vaccination. All European countries have built their infrastructure, we could deliver many more vaccines, we just don’t have access to them. Having said that, in spite of the delays in terms of approving vaccines, I still think that European cooperation in terms of purchasing vaccines has been, overall, a success story. Of course we will push companies to honor their contracts and deliver vaccines faster.
But I am a little skeptical about these daily counts of how many we have vaccinated. We have taken the conscious decision of making sure that we will always stockpile the second dose, so that there is going to be no delay whatsoever, because we know that these vaccines have been approved based on very specific clinical trials. We don’t want to take the risk to run out of doses and not administer the second dose on time, according to the protocols that these vaccines have been approved for.
If we assume that in Q2 we will have a big breakthrough in terms of the number of available vaccines, I do expect the real mass vaccination to start at some point in March, April, May.
If we also assume that there is a degree of seasonality, which we saw last year, one can envision a return to normal by late spring, early summer. Certainly very important for us given that we want people to travel and come to Greece, but we want people to come to Greece safely.
That is why we also launched this initiative at the European level regarding some sort of vaccine certification. Obviously now -we have vaccinated close to 2% of our population- it’s not a relevant discussion but it will become relevant at some point sooner rather than later.
So the conditions making it easier for people to travel assuming they have been vaccinated is going to be an important topic for Europe as a whole. Until then it’s going to be stop-and-go. Again, as I told you, we opened our retail activity a few days ago. We are very carefully monitoring cases but all this is taking a big economic hit. We have supported jobs through aggressive furlough schemes, but we know we cannot do that forever.
So a lot is really dependent “a” on the vaccination availability and “b” on people complying with the basic rules that we know actually do work. I am cautiously optimistic on both fronts.
John Micklethwait: Prime Minister, a more political issue for you. Do you think that the rest of the world has a responsibility to put pressure on China about this?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I agree with what Dr. Fauci said, first of all on China’s responsibility to be transparent on this issue. On the role of the WHO. That’s what it is designed to do and it is clear that it has a very important role to play. Of course, at the European level, because we are also a supranational organization that is looking to serve the well-being of European citizens. I think there is more we can do to coordinate policies. There is a big debate concerning our dependence on supply chains and not being dependent…
John Micklethwait: Do you think the European Union? To begin with this was not the EU’s finest hour. Certainly it was not the Americans administration’s finest hour, but not the EU’s either. Do you think now the European Union has got its act together?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I think at the beginning it was a race, a national race, a Wild West when we were trying to procure PPE during April and May. But I would still argue that in spite of delays the fact that the European Union decided to purchase vaccines centrally and allocate them per capita without making any distinction between rich and poor countries in the EU was a moment of European solidarity. I certainly feel better that the European Union is negotiating on our behalf and not having to negotiate as a medium-size country on our own with a big pharma on this issue. Could we have done it better and faster? Certainly. Let’s not forget that we all have access to vaccines. Hopefully the pace is going to accelerate, because we managed to purchase them at the European level.
We also need approval at the European level. You know that we have approved two vaccines, there is a question of approving the AstraZeneca vaccine. Hopefully if the European authorities decide to approve it, we will also have access to that. But I think that the crisis has taught us a lot about how we can better cooperate at the European level.
