>> People are going to be talking about what we've been through over the last year in decades and decades to come in a similar manner that we would often reference the 1918 pandemic flu.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I'm talking to one of the most recognizable doctors in America.

Heck, maybe the world.

Since the pandemic began, his face has been on everything from cupcakes to candles.

Dr. Anthony Fauci first appeared on "GZERO World" late in 2019, just weeks before the pandemic took hold.

What a difference a year makes.

Today, he's the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.

We'll talk about the challenges ahead in the battle against coronavirus and reasons for hope that things are getting better.

And then it's puppets.

>> Desperate times call for desperate measures.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> It was March 11, 2020.

Coronavirus cases around the world stood at 118,000.

4,291 people had died.

Those numbers were alarming enough.

But the director-general of the World Health Organization made this announcement.

>> We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.

>> That same day, here in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci offered this warning to Congress.

>> If we are complacent and don't do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions.

>> Since then, the United States has led the world in both infection rates and deaths, ultimately making 2020 the deadliest year in American history.

2020 also brought historic scientific breakthroughs, including right here in the United States, the record development and approval of vaccines that could bring an end to the biggest public health crisis in a century.

But according to the CDC, life expectancy had its largest decline in the United States last year since World War II, down a full year on average, with even bigger drops for black and Hispanic Americans.

Coronavirus was a leading factor, but so too was a lack of treatment for chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, and hypertension.

As the jobs dried up during the pandemic, so did health insurance for as many as 15 million people in this country, including an estimated 3 in 10 Gen Z'ers and millennials.

How about all those kids for whom school became a screen at home or nothing at all?

The World Bank says 1.6 billion children were out of school at the peak of the pandemic last April, and 700 million still were at the end of 2020.

Everything from academic growth to emotional well-being to physical safety will have lifelong impacts for far too many.

Finally, there are the many unknowns about COVID itself and how it will affect the long-term health of those who recovered from the virus and what that could mean for them for decades to come.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has suggested life could return to something closer to normal by 2022, thank God.

But there are many questions about what awaits all of us on the other side.

I'm talking about that and the ongoing race to vaccinate with none other than Dr. Fauci.

Here's our conversation.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, thank you so much for coming back to join us.

>> Thank you.

It's good to be with you.

>> So, let me say that in the fall of 2019, I mean, literally weeks before the pandemic hit, when I asked you what kept you up at night... >> Obviously the evolution of a "pandemic-like respiratory infection," likely influenza.

>> ...how close are we to having lived through your worst nightmare?

>> I think we are living through much of that worst nightmare.

I had said, when asked in more detail, I remember multiple times responding a respiratory illness that jumped species from an animal host that has a high degree of efficiency in transmitting from person to person and has the high degree of morbidity and mortality either on the general population or in certain groups of people.

And in this case, we know we're at that landmark right now of 500,000 deaths, which is historic and horrible in its proportion.

I mean, people are going to be talking about what we've been through over the last year in decades and decades to come in a similar manner that we would often reference the 1918 pandemic flu.

>> We appear right now to be in a race between vaccinations and virus variants.

And even as case rates are plummeting right now, health officials are getting increasingly alarmed that variants could lead to another surge even in the coming weeks.

What's your best sense right now of whether we are winning that race?

>> You know, we are in a race for sure.

The thing that's encouraging is the sharp slope of the downward trajectory of not only the daily cases, but the weekly averages.

As you said, I think appropriately, we know that we have a variant that is now taking hold in the United States that has already shown in the U.K. that it has an enhanced capability compared to the wild type virus of transmitting from person to person and likely also is a bit more virulent.

That virus, if you do modeling, tells us that it will be dominant in this country probably by the end of March.

So a race, if you want to call it, between a dominant virus that is clearly sensitive to the vaccine that we're using, but has a very strong capability of spreading and transmitting from person to person.

So, we have two major tools in our arsenal.

One is a vaccine which, as the weeks and the months go by, we get more and more available to put in people's arms.

We have, you know, a significant discrepancy between supply and demand.

If we had all the vaccine that we would need right now and did mass vaccinations, I believe our chances of winning this war metaphorically between the virus and ourselves, we would have a distinct advantage.

But we have two tools, one of which is immediately available to us, and that is everybody doing the kinds of public health measures that we've been talking about constantly.

The universal wearing of masks, the avoiding close contact, the avoiding congregate settings, particularly indoors, the washing of hands.

If we did that in a very assiduous way that everyone pulls together, even without a vaccine, you could be a pretty good defense against the spread.

Superimposed upon that, the fact that, as every week goes by, we get more and more people vaccinated, that is, you know, as you said, it's a work in progress.

I mean, a dynamic situation between what we're doing to halt the virus and the virus' capability of continue to spread.

It is conceivable that if we fall short, that we will have a surge, an additional surge.

It's also conceivable, if we do this correctly and everyone pulls together, everyone in the country, I mean, all regions, all states do it together, that we could suppress this to a very, very low level.

And once you get the dynamics of the outbreak to a very, very low level, even when you get additional surges, it becomes much more effective to be able to identify, isolate, contact trace.

>> What's your best sense now?

I know and you've acknowledged that there's been some confusion around this, around when healthy Americans are going to be able to get vaccinated.

>> So you're asking when do you get to a healthy young person who has no priority?

>> Right.

>> Well, I had originally said April.

I think that's probably too early because I believe given the pace at which vaccines are coming in now, by the time we get the elderly and those with underlying conditions and the other people in society, it probably won't be until May or June before we can at least start to get the "normal, non-prioritized person" vaccinated.

As the President said correctly, by July, we will have enough vaccines to vaccinate everybody in the country.

And it would merely be a logistic challenge of getting vaccines efficiently into the arms of individuals.

And that's when you'll start seeing the kinds of vaccine programs where you may open up a big auditorium or a stadium and have people lined up to come in where it's just a question of getting a lot of vaccinators, people who are able to give the vaccine.

>> There has been a lot of questions and a lack of clarity around once you get your second jab and you wait a few days, what's it like for an American who's now gone through their two vaccine jabs?

They've done everything they're supposed to do.

They've been under lockdowns.

They've had the mask on.

They've been socially distancing.

They've been not living life the way we'd like to for a year now.

How does it change once they've gotten their second jab?

>> You know, it'll change gradually because you want to accumulate data to make sure.

There are two elements here.

You, yourself, and the danger to you if you're vaccinated versus what is outside in the dynamics of the outbreak, outside of your own individual situation.

Because if you're vaccinated and you're like 5% to 10% of the country is vaccinated, 15%, and there's still an average of 68,000 infections a day, what you can do outside what society will allow you to do.

Just because you're vaccinated, restaurants are not going to open.

Bowl games are not going to be played necessarily.

So what you're going to be able to do is really going to be reflective of what your own degree of safety, what you yourself can do.

So what we're going to be trying to do very soon, I hope, is to come out with some specific statements about if you are in this category, this is what you likely can do.

But right now, the way things are right now, given the degree of infection and the dynamics of the virus in the community, that's the reason why we say you still have to wear a mask even though you're vaccinated because you could get infected, not know it, and be completely without symptoms because the vaccine is preventing you from getting symptoms.

But you can have virus in your nasal pharynx and then inadvertently and innocently pass it on to someone else who's not vaccinated.

That's the problem we're facing.

>> Those rules for individuals who have been vaccinated, some basic guidelines for all of them that will be clear around behavior, a matter of days, weeks?

Do you have a sense of when that's going to be public?

>> I don't want to give a date on it.

Then someone will call back and say, "You gave the wrong date."

I hope it's soon.

I hope it's within the matter of several weeks to a month or more, so that when you start to get really a larger proportion of the population vaccinated, people are going to say more and more, "Hey, wait a minute.

What can I do and what can't I do now that I'm vaccinated?"

It's a very reasonable question.

>> A lot of people have been frustrated about school reopenings.

Can you explain to frustrated parents who are watching gyms reopen and restaurants reopen why so many schools are still closed across the country?

I mean, how much of this is teachers unions?

How much of this is politics?

>> You know, it's a combination of so many things.

I wouldn't say it's, you know, politics, but it is a concern.

It's a complicated issue.

So what I would say, and I've said this well before the guidelines that the CDC came out with were actually out, that the default position should be that we do whatever we can, as best as we can to get the children back in school and staying in school to the extent we can possibly do this.

That should be a very high priority.

And what we would have to do in order to reach that priority would be to put the resources in, to be able to have a situation where getting them back to school pays a great deal of attention to the safety and the welfare of the children, of the teachers, and of the other educational personnel in the school.

That includes doing things like prioritizing teachers to get vaccinated.

I'm not saying that it has to be you don't go back to teaching unless you're vaccinated, but we should be making them in our prioritization a very high priority among essential personnel.

And the guidelines are really a layered mitigation description, which, if followed, I believe will make it safer and easier to get the kids back to school.

>> The last time we spoke, we talked a little bit about anti-vax sentiment, and it was seen as more of a fringe issue.

>> There's this... >> Complacency.

>> ...feeling.

Well, it's complacency, but it also is what I refer to as libertarianism taken to the extreme where they feel they don't want any authority, civil or medical, to tell them what they are going to do with their children or with their family.

>> Increasingly, it's becoming more significant.

Obviously, it's more of a priority given what's happening in the world, but also becoming more of a partisan issue.

So many more Republicans saying that they are not prepared to get vaccinated.

Now, given given the success, even under President Trump of Operation Warp Speed, why do you think that we have seen the politicization of vaccines and anti-vax sentiment?

>> Well, the vaccine hesitancy is a multifactorial issue.

It's not explained by one thing.

I believe that there certainly is an element of polarization, of public health measures.

I believe that's less a case of getting vaccinated, namely people who might not want to wear masks because that can be a political statement.

as we know, unfortunately, what we've experienced over the past year.

Some people are fundamentally anti-vax, anti-science.

That's the first thing.

Others have misperceptions about the safety of the vaccine.

Others, like minority populations, historically have not been treated well by federally backed health systems, that infamous, many-decade-ago issue with Tuskegee... >> Tuskegee, yeah.

>> ...which, you know, most of the young African-American individuals today weren't even born during that time.

But it gets passed down generation to generation about not trusting the federal government.

When people are hesitant for that reason, you should respect their hesitancy and explain that what we have in place now are ethical guidelines and ethical constraints that would never allow that to happen again and then answer the questions of why many people are hesitant or reluctant to get vaccinated.

One of the most common is they say, "Well, it was so fast.

We always talk about vaccines requiring years to develop.

We just found out about this virus in January of 2020.

And in less than a year, you're putting vaccine doses into people's arms.

It must have been cutting corners or sacrificing safety."

And when you explain to people that this is just a reflection of the exquisite advances in the science of vaccine platform technology and imaging technology that had gone over for years and years before this outbreak.

And I think if we go step by step and explain to people, we can win more people over than you can imagine.

There will always be a hard-core group of people who would not want to be vaccinated.

But I think so many people's, their hesitancy can be overcome by reaching out to them in a respectful way.

>> I'm wondering from a science perspective, taking the politics away, once we've gotten to the point that we're able to vaccinate people outside of priorities in the U.S., would you say it would be better to also be able to export vaccines globally to the priority groups in other countries around the world?

>> Well, certainly if you have enough vaccine to do that.

You know, we're part of what's called COVAX, which is that consortium of countries and organizations.

The President just a few days ago has indicated that we'll be giving a total of $4 billion, $2 billion essentially right away, and $2 billion a little bit later.

So we are importantly part of that global effort to get vaccines to people in the developing world.

This is a global pandemic and you control a global pandemic by having a global response.

If we and some other developed countries are the only ones that are actually putting all of our effort in getting the particular epidemic in our own country under control, as long as there's outbreaks anywhere in the world, everywhere in the world is in danger.

And that's the reason why we have to have a global pandemic response so that we get all the countries, even countries who can't afford or don't have the resources to get vaccine need to be helped out.

And that's why we have COVAX and other approaches that will be taken.

>> So just looking forward a little bit before we close, I mean, how does this movie end, in your view?

Is this something that becomes endemic?

Is it probable that we have annual boosters?

What does it look like after everyone is vaccinated in the country?

>> To be honest with you, Ian, we don't know.

We can't be certain.

If we nail this down in the sense of getting the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated and we get herd immunity within our country, things could change dramatically, at least for the time being in our country.

The wild card in all of this is that if we don't control it at the global level, there's always the danger of outside world where there's a lot more virus if we don't get the world and the global response that we can get variants that could come back into the country and regenerate outbreaks, which gets to what your question is.

Are we going to have a cyclic problem here that every year we got to worry about variants coming in from other countries?

The answer is I don't know.

But I believe the more aggressive we are in vaccinating ourselves and contributing to the global effort to suppress this globally, not only within our own country, the adherence to public health measures that are so important, we could -- it is possible that we could eliminate it, as we did with measles in this country, and eradicate it as we did with smallpox.

That's conceivable.

But we've got to put a lot of effort into that.

>> And I know this has been a horrible year to live through.

But on the back of it, do you think we are better prepared for the next pandemic when it comes as a consequence?

>> Well, we have seen the things that we have got to do.

We've seen what doesn't work.

We've seen the importance of cooperation and collaboration at the state and federal level, the importance of local public health systems, the importance of transparency.

Importantly, the one thing that was and is a resounding success in this terrible year that we've been through is the biomedical research enterprise, which gave us, in record time, vaccines that are not only safe, but they're highly efficacious.

Could you imagine what things would be like if we did not have a vaccine?

There would not be a light at the end of the tunnel right now.

And right now there is, if we go at it, get people vaccinated and abide by public health measures.

>> Dr. Anthony Fauci is one of the busiest men in America.

I really appreciate you joining us today.

>> Good to be with you.

Thank you for having me.

>> And now to "Puppet Regime," where a rocky vaccine rollout in Europe is forcing German Chancellor Angela Merkel to hit the streets.

Roll that tape.

>> Ah!

We don't have enough vaccines for all of Europe.

This is a disaster.

>> I know, and even if we had them in France, they don't want to take them.

>> How did we screw this up?

Ah, Boris is in the waiting room again.

What does he have to say?

>> How about this one, Angela?

Brexit was a dream come true.

Now we've got vaccines and you maybe start improving those approvals and get moving and you can get your own jobs too.

[ Laughs ] Loving it over here, Angela.

>> Look, I don't like this at all, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

And I know someone who can help.

Yikes.

I haven't done this since like the 1980s.

>> Drips, doses, weed, coke, Ecstasy, Novichok, nuclear submarines, Sputnik V. >> Hello, Vladimir.

>> Well, well, well.

Look who it is.

I never thought I'd see you out here.

>> Look, you know I don't like this at all.

Just let's get this over with, okay?

I want to be higher than I've ever been.

I need 50 million doses of Sputnik.

>> Yes, I guess they were right.

Russian gas really is just gateway drug.

[ Laughs ] Okay, now show me your money.

>> How do I know that's the good stuff?

>> Trust me, but verify.

This is 94.5% uncut raw efficacy.

Now fork over the money.

I have a busy night.

I have to meet Mexico, Brazil, Hungary.

>> Ja, ja, ja, okay.

I'm not proud of this, but okay.

Here's the money.

[ Siren wails ] >> Freeze!

Hold it right there with that malarkey.

You're busted.

>> Nein!

Joe, I swear this is not what it looks like.

It's not for me.

It's for -- >> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, and of course you did because I got your Fauci.

You love the Fauci.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...