this is gps, the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world, i'm fareed zakaria, coming to you live from new york. today on the program -- >> we'll fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion. >> as omicron entered our lexicon and our world, dozens of countries shut down their borders, especially from travel originating from africa. across that continent, less than 10% of the population is vaccinated. is this the new apartheid? i will be talking to a south african activist who says yes.

also, i will ask the chairman of moderna whether his vaccine keeps people safe against the new variant. then moscow versus the west. after a week of much diplomacy by secretary of state blinken, can a potential russian invasion of ukraine be averted? i will discuss with james starve reedus, nato's former supreme allied commander. and understanding the new round of nuclear talks in vienna. as iran and the u.s. appear miles apart, washington says it's prepared to use other options if the talks fail. what does this mean? i'll talk to former state department official vali nasr. but first here's "my take." the saddest thing about the emergence of the omicron variant is the utter unpredictability.

for months, maybe longer, health officials have been warning as long as the covid-19 virus can circulate freely and wildly, it would change its form and those mutations could be more difficult to handle than the original variant. in october this year, former british prime minister gordon brown predicted just this, he said we in the west may feel safe and blessed at the moment because we have had the vaccines but we may find a new variant that comes out of africa or asia, where people have not been vaccinated and are not protected and it obviously isn't susceptible to the vaccines that we have at the moment. the solution was also utterly obvious, to vaccine the rest of the world and fast but that never happened. and the resulting disparities are stunning. close to 70% of the european union and about 60% of the united states have been fully vaccinated. and yet only about 8% of people

in the world's poorest countries have received even one dose. earlier this year, this failure could be attributed to a problem of production and supply. but the world is now producing 1.5 billion doses of vaccine monthly. the problem has been one of distribution, or to put it bluntly, of the rich world hoarding vaccines at the expense of the poor. according to the health analytics company air finerty, by the end of march 2022, the g7 and eu are projected to a surplus of 818 million vaccines, and this is assuming 500 million more donations to poor countries are made and every adult in these countries, g7 and eu, are fully vaccinated plus receiving a booster. it's estimated 51 million of the doses stored by western countries will expire and have to be thrown away by the end of this year if they're not used,

and yet they sit stockpiled while the poorest 1.6 billion people in the world have about 5% of the world's vaccinations. this is not a case of global institutions failing. there's an effective mechanism to share and distribute the vaccines worldwide, covax, set up by a group of international health organizations. but rich countries have been stingy about actually making donations. the u.s. pledged the most, 1.2 billion doses, but so far delivered about 280 million. the eu, iceland and norway collectively pledged about 5 million and delivered about 112 million. china has recently increased its pledge from 850 million, up from 100 million, and delivered about 89 million. as a result of all of this, dozens of countries are at risk of falling short of the w.h.o.'s goal of vaccinating 40% of every country's population by december 2021. which means the virus will keep

replicating and mutating freely among billions of people. what is the chance that we will not see another variant in the next year? vaccinating the world will be good for the world economy, which mostly means the richest countries that dominated. in may of this year the imf released a proposal that calculated vaccinating the world by 2022 would cost $50 billion but a failure to do so could cost the world by 2025 $9 trillion. put another way, an investment of 0.06% of global gdp could have a 180-fold return on that investment. covid and public health are not the only areas we see a self-destructive nationalism at work these days. the hot economic topic is inflation and what is causing it. the biden administration's covid relief spending is often blamed for triggering it and it has

almost certainly played some role. strikingly though we see rising inflation almost everywhere, including in countries that did not spend freely after the pandemic. and what could explain this global inflation? protectionist policies like trump's trade war with biden and biden's buy american. the former secretary wrote tariff reduction is the most supply-side policy the administration can undertake to combat inflation. for the last three decades countries have been aggressively sourcing goods from across the world because they are cheaper. once they began reshoring, finding domestic spies and putting in place versions of biden's buy american provisions, they are paying more for those

same things. adds in supply disruption and demands for goods, and you have inflation rising everywhere. just last week they doubled tariffs on canadian softwood lumber. so far the rhetoric of nationalism has been cheap but as governments turn that rhetoric into policies, the costs are mounting. they've been felt by the poorest in the world and will hurt the working classes in rich countries the most. the answer is obvious, greater global cooperation and public health, trade and more. but will any national leader dare to say that? go to cnn.com for a link to my "washington post" column. and let's get started. ♪ you heard "my take" now let me bring in our human rights

warrior and founder and director of health justice initiative in south africa. welcome. i know you have been critical of the travel bans put in place by many in the country, including the united states, towards people coming out of south africa. is it not fair as a way of trying to prevent the vaccine spread, even though it is obviously not going to work perfectly, but isn't it fair to in some way try to stop the spread? how do you think about it? >> they don't think it's fair because the way in which it's being imposed is quite uneven and a lot of responses in the last few days really smacked in a very knee-jerk way of dealing with this pandemic. it goes against the solidarity promised to us at the beginning of this pandemic. if you see some of the responses from countries like canada as well as uk and also the u.s. in

the last 72 hours, we just feel that it's really bedevilled with racism in a way in which the application of the travel ban is being imposed to basically isolate most countries in southern africa and africa in particular, but not to impose the same kind of restrictions or measures on countries from the north because they're being discovered. we just heard canada will not even accept a pcr test being conducted in many parts of our world. so really there's a sense of people being really angry and enraged in the way the u.s. and uk and countries like the u.s. and canada in particular are applying those particular travel bans for those particular variants. >> do you worry that it will -- it will have a chilling effect on other countries alerting the world to the arrival of a new variant? because what happened in south africa, as i understand and in botswana, scientists were very open, very transparent and immediately told the world,

look, we have this new variant? >> we are concerned about that and obviously the scientists in south africa and botswana should be congratulated for not acting in a secret way, for sharing information in a timely manner. the chilling effect, the concern we have in relation to that is it may deter other scientists in other parts of the world -- there's currently debate in parts of southern africa how much information you should be sharing with the rest of the world. the more concerning thing is it's leading to vaccine hesitancy because there's a sense amongst the communities in which we work in that if our vaccines are not going to be accepted, some are fully vaccines and double shot of the pfizer vaccine, if that will not be accepted for the purposes of traveling to the global north, our pcr results not accepted, we say why bother vaccinating if we're only going to be isolated and not even be allowed to enter your jurisdiction? >> there is a larger problem

though, is there not, with vaccine hesitancy? i wanted to ask you about this because in south africa, for example, at one point the government said stop shipping us vaccines, we have enough. the problem was not enough people were getting the shots. is the vaccine hesitancy about a more broadly a hesitation about western medicine? is it being influenced by the anti-vax arguments and propaganda coming out of places like the united states? >> i think the answer to that is it's likely more complex. i think the percentages are misleading and we've seen a lot of worrying in the past few days basically saying the reason why we have this variant is because people in africa don't want to get vaccinated. recent studies in data show quite the opposite, there's a greater willingness to take the vaccine and greater vaccine up take and parts of our world don't have sufficient supplies where we have been dripfed with

vaccine supplies than people in parts of the global north. and currently there's a vaccine hesitancy because we're dealing with fast-moving pandemic information shifting on an almost daily basis, start, stop, clinical issues. but it's being made much harder and clinically harder because of anti-vax movements that are actually quite functional and quite alive in the u.s. with local chapters here too. and that is making it more difficult. the longer it takes for us to get full shots into people's arms in africa, you have more times for hesitancy and vaccine movement to escalate the disinformation. remember in the last four months, fareed, more booster shots have been administered in parts of the global north that even flu shots in africa. time really is against us. i think the emergence of the new variant and what we have been hitting in the last week shelves

are self-defeating the vaccinating of most in the north of booster shots and not even prioritize first shots for most people in africa. only one in four health care workers in africa have been vaccinated. and yet for over a year now they're facing effective vaccines on the market that could have been used to actually protect our frontline. >> dr. hassan, pleasure to have you on. thank you very much for that. next on "gps" -- will the current vaccines work against a new variant? the million dollar question. i will ask the chairman of moderna just that question when we come back.

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new law. lower prices. more people qualify. at healthcare.gov omicron is how effective will the current vaccines be against this new variant? my next guest will know the answer. joining me now is noubar afeyan, the co-founder and chairman of moderna. noubar, welcome. previously when you have come on this program, you explained very, very kindly to us how your extraordinary vaccine works. the mrna vaccine sends kind of essentially a text message to

the body, tells it produces therefore one protein, the spike protein. the problem is now is this new variant has altered that protein, particularly around where the spike is, and it's a big alteration. delta had two or three changes. this has 10 to 12 changes to the spike protein. will the mrna moderna vaccine work against this new variant? >> fareed, thanks for having me. forgive me for my voice. i have a bit of a cold. so i think we're going to learn this more definitively over the next seven to ten days. we're doing the experiments needed to establish whether the reduction in binding that could be there nevertheless allows us to be protective against this variant virus. the reason the scientific community has been quite concerned is because, as you said, there are many, many variations in the binding region and we have not seen that before. but that does not mean the way

our immune system will not respond will not be adequate. in fact, we suspect we will see protection against the more severe hospitalization, death indications. but we also want to see is will it be protective against being infected all together? ideally, we would like to protect everyone against infection, not just hospitalization. >> so should we think of the mrna vaccines a little bit like the flu vaccine in relation to omicron? in other words, you've got some protection but, you know, there's still a chance you'll get it but if you have the vaccine, you're likely to have less severe symptoms, less hospitalization? is that a reasonable analogy? >> fareed, i think it's a little bit early to say that. let me just say what we're doing at moderna, the pioneer of this technology platform, announced last week four steps. one, we can boost with a higher

dose. our technology allows us to do that. we will see if the higher boost gives us more protection so you goo get the same type of protection as we had with other strains. we are going to try a couple multi version of antigens and that's never been done before. and ultimately we will also will add a final pressure, developing an omicron spike, which will take a good 60 to 100 days to be ready to deployed. so we're taking all of the possibility and putting resources behind them. the simplest would be the same dose or higher dose of what we already have and the rest follow. >> which is extraordinarily about the technology about the development is you can say pretty confidentially probably in 90 days, you will be able to develop something because it's really like a cold, it's no longer this process of trial and

error. do you think that this is the future, where we're going to get more variants probably and you're just going to have to keep seeing whether you need to adjust the code? >> yes, i think the past ten years of developing the platform, several billion dollars has gone into doing this, enables us using computational approaches and all of the learning we made in mrna, take the code, test it and see if we can get the antibodies needed for maximum protection. we should keep in mind our job is to develop the maximum protection for most people safely. and we have a new tool in the vaccine arsenal that allows us to operate at speeds to match what a virus can do. previously we were several years behind the virus and with the flu, as you mentioned, we were guessing what variants we would get and trying to at least put a dent in it. here we'd like to strive towards

the very high effectiveness we've already seen, just keep up with the variations to protect people for years if needed. if not we would be quite happy to have the thing go away, that's very clear. >> let me ask you about this, a lot of people -- some people are saying you guys should be giving this technology away, waving all of your intellectual patents. explain what moderna's position is on this. as i understand it, you said you're not going to enforce patents as long as covid is around? >> fareed, the first time we spoke was around the time a year ago we voluntarily pledged -- only company to have done that -- voluntarily not to enforce our patents against anybody who uses our patents to make a vaccine against the pandemic. at that time there had been no proof that the vaccine would work but we did that because we thought it's the right thing to do from a vaccine access standpoint. we believe that has enabled others to make mrna vaccines and

if others do that even further, that's great. in addition we added to our production capacity. so this year we will have produced about 800 million doses. next year 2 billion to 3 billion doses. so combined by adding production capacity and allowing others to use our intellectual property, we've taken steps voluntarily to do the maximum we can and we invite everyone to do the same. >> let me ask you, as with all of your judgment and all of your knowledge, the question a lot of people are thinking, is it safe to travel? if you're double vaccinated, do you feel you can go about your life as you were before this omicron was detected? or what are you doing? >> look, fareed, i'm living in the u.s. and the delta is a pretty serious threat as it is for people not yet boosted. so i would say, like i did last time, that people should get

full double vaccinations. the boost is an important part fighting the delta. not the other variant yet but definitely delta. if people are doubting the importance of getting boostered, we need to enhance the antibody levels to prevent infections. and i believe that should be the public health goal. simply saying it's okay for people to get infected because they won't need to go to the hospital, i worry this perpetuates this problem because infected people infects others, even if they don't get the worst version of it. so boosting will be very important in my view. i'm watching omicron carefully. over the next week to ten days it will be clear. certainly i'm wearing masks much more than i was in the past couple of months and i will see how to adjust behavior based on how serious this is. we have the tools, vaccines, boosts, masks and separations will protect us. we have to work on getting the rest of the world vaccinated, and to me as your past segments said, there's a lot of work to do in the last mile. we need the education and supplies to make sure everyone

gets vaccinated, other we will be talking about this for many, many years. >> noubar, i want to thank you for doing this. i know you have a very bad cold and cough. you drugged yourself to be able to do the show and i think you know it was important to people to hear from you. so thank you very much. >> thank you for having me. next on "gps" -- biden and putin are talking on tuesday. will that conversation calm any of the fears that russia might invade ukraine at any time? back in a moment

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vladimir putin will talk with one another on a secure video call on thus. this comes as the u.s. and its western allies grow more concerned that russia intends to invade ukraine again. but biden said on friday he was going to make it, quote, very, very difficult for mr. putin to go ahead and do what people worry he may do, unquote. how will this all play out? retired navy general was the commander and latest book is "the sailor's bookshelf." admiral, welcome. if you're back at your headquarters and looking at this, what about this 100,000 troop buildup is worrying or are there signs putin is saber rattling and he won't go ahead and invade? >> fareed, if this were saber-rattling i would say this

is out of the skaber and being we'ved erratically in the face of the ukrainians now. i would be very concerned. i suspect he's hunkered down with his intelligence officials with his operations team looking at this minute by minute on what would otherwise be a quiet sunday at his headquarters in belgium. we ought to be worried because putin's done this before. we mentioned the previous invasion of ukraine in 2013. you will remember in 2008 he invaded georgia and still owns a couple of chunks of that country, just like he "owns," i'm putting that in quotes, the crimea. if own is where crime meets opportunity, you see motive and a lot of opportunity with the buildup, 100,000 troops, and has the full attention of nato and the biden administration. >> let me ask you about that. in both of those cases, which i have been thinking about, putin

calculated he could get away with taking those pieces of the territory that had a lot of russian speakers, were in some ways sympathetic to russia. this next move in ukraine will be very different, it seems to me. he will be up against a very hostile population and one that over the last five or seven years has been rebuilding its army. you have to give the previous ukrainian government and current one a lot of credit and the west a lot of credit for arming them. all i'm saying is it does seem to me this would be a very tough haul for even with 100,000 troops, dealing with a hostile local population as the united states has learned in certain parts of the world, that's tough. >> what he will not want is to get bogged down in his own version of a forever war, watching body bags go back to moscow. but there's kind of a middle position there, fareed, which is what i worry about. the southeastern corner, the

so-called donbass region, has a high percentage of russian speakers. it would also constitute, if you will, a land bridge that goes from russia proper to crimea. one could hypothesize he could push in, grab the southeast corner and then it's just another version of the same playbook from georgia and same book that got him crimea. that is probably the calculus he's wrestling with right now. >> how should -- and presumably what he's trying to do -- part of what he's trying to do is put ukraine on edge, make it difficult for him to consolidate its democracy and essentially dare tell him, don't you dare try to aly formally for nato membership and telling nato, don't you dare admit them. how should the ukrainians in the west view this issue? is it dangerously productive for ukraine to take progressive steps to become a nato member or does it become all the more necessary? >> ukraine is already in what's

called a membership action plan, which is kind of pre-step for gaining full membership in nato. that train has left the station, if you will. what putin is trying to do, you're correct, scaring the ukrainians into pulling back from that process, doing everything he can to intimidate them. what we should be doing is applying the tools that we have, gathering more intelligence, publicizing what he's doing. the more we talk about this on shows like this, i think the less likely he actually does this -- cyber. press in against his command and control networks. be ready to go if need be. more weapons to ukraine that can be used defensively but lethally if he decides to make the move. above all, fareed, we've got to get this out of a u.s. versus russia kind of contest. we've got to get nato engaged in

this, our allies. really this ought to be the west saying to vladimir putin, you cannot do this for a third time. let's hope he listens and i think that's the message that president biden will seek to convey on tuesday. >> how firmly would the europeans back an american move like that? do you hear that the germans are -- have mixed feelings, the nord stream pipeline being approved, does that hold them hostage on this issue or are they fairly tough? >> from everything i can see talking to many my friends in europe, they will stand with us on this one. they have thus far despite the interdependencies you talked about which are exacerbated by the nord stream 2 pipeline, something we have mentioned to our european friends.

frankly, fareed, it's going to be sanctions that most hold putin back, directed sanctions against his senior leadership team, very personal ones. oil and gas sanctions, recognizing the complexities given european dependencies and thirdly, ultimately, secondary sanctions could be applied. we have secondary tools in the quiver and i'm sure president biden will be pointing those out to president vladimir putin tuesday. >> jim, very good to have you on and your book is well displayed behind your shoulder and i hope people go and buy it. next on "gps," the first nuclear talks in almost six weeks were held in vienna this week and they didn't go that well. the backstory when we come back. . so ben is feeling pretty zen. that's the planning effect from fidelity

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in vienna this week, iran came to the negotiating table for the first time since its new president was sworn in, in

august but it wasn't willing to talk to the u.s. directly. then in the middle of the talks, the international atomic energy agency announced iran stepped up its enrichment of u raining yum. on friday the parties left the table on a sour note to go back to their respective capitals, get instructions and regroup. vali nasr is a professor at t t hns hopkins school of advanced studies and former state department adviser. vali nasr, pleasure to have you on. >> thank you. >> give us a sense of what the iranian view is. what are the iranian requirements demands in these negotiations? you have unique sides of the negotiating table. you have been talking to people on both sides. we would like to hear what the iranian perspective is. >> it's simply they want the sanctions to be lifted, to go back to 2017 and back into the

full compliance, the united states and iran in full compliance with jcpwa. but it's not apparent they will lift sanctions and if not reimpose them under a different president. so now to lift sanctions, they want some guarantee this would have legs and survive a biden administration. >> so as i understand it, from reading what you have written, part of the issue is that if the sanctions are lifted and there's the fear they may be reimposed, let's say 2024 trump is back in office or a republican is back in office, no company is going to do a deal with iran, particularly oil companies which need long -- they need to know this is going to be -- these sanctions will be lifted for ten years, 20 years. what they're looking for is some stability and predictability. what does the biden administration say when the

iranians say, look, we need some guarantee this won't be an on again/off again process? >> well, exactly. the deal has no value for iran if there's no pathway to have direct foreign investment coming into iran or if they sell their oil, they're able to bring back their money to the country. currently they have $20 billion, $30 billion that is locked outside of the country. the biden administration said no american president can give such a guarantee that a successor will not reimpose sanctions, but i think the trick comes down to whether there's a creative way to give the iranians the confidence the deal will not be completely undone in two years time. they're not negotiating for just two years with the united states. >> so where we are now is iran is moving closer and closer to really fairly advanced nuclear capacity. the united states has not found a way to really get them back into the deal. what happens next as this goes

on? >> i think both sides are motivated to keep talking. neither side wants collapse, which would mean a catastrophe for the region and major crisis for both of them. and i think iran does need sanctions relief. but the iran yangs feel america's leverage on them is maxing out. there's not much more pleasure the americans can apply on them but they are not applying maximum pressure on the united states by advancing their nuclear program significantly. i don't think they want a nuclear weapon. they want to get the biden administration to lift sanctions and i think they think the bigger the program becomes, the more threatening it becomes, the more seriously they would be taken and more motivated the biden administration will be to deal with them. >> you have a terrific piece in foreign affairs talking about how this is all happening in the context of a highly sectarian middle east. explain the center point of your article. >> if the deal collapses, there's bog to be confrontation between iran and the united states and iran and its

neighbors in the region over control of syria, lebanon, iraq and yemen, and the momentary stability -- minimal stability we are seeing is in danger of collapsing. so if the united states really wants to disentangle from the middle east, wants to reduce tensions and it doesn't want a much larger conflagration in the region, it has to get to a deal with iran. >> the way you're describing in the middle east is one way, iran is inching towards real nuclear capacity. israel is looking for ways to either through hybrid war or actual war take out that capacity. presumably the saudis and gulf of arab states are looking warily at this process because they would be dragged into it and the united states is sitting on top of it all trying to disengage. is the conclusion, is it fair to say trump's pulling out of the iran nuclear deal and in

retrospect now looking frankly like a catastrophe? >> indeed. it is probably one of the biggest strategic mistakes the united states has made. every assumption that the trump administration, the netanyahu government in israel and the persian gulf states made in 2017 have proven to be catastrophically wrong. iran is more dangerous, more volatile and the west looks to be out of options in order to stop iran's nuclear program. and what is going on is a last chance to stop a much clater calamity. >> vali nasr, thank you for that. >> thank you. next on "gps" -- the lightning speed of the taliban takeover in af afghanistan? how did they do it? you will hear a fascinating story of spies playing a very long game when we come back.

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the taliban's lightning fast advance earlier this year left many scratching their heads about how afghanistan collapsed just so quickly. we now have a missing piece of the puzzle, a big piece. according to a report in "the wall street journal," the taliban had a network of cavort operatives who infiltrated all manners of organizations across the country and emerged at the last minute to cease control of afghan cities. margherita stancati is one of the reporters on that story. she joins me from london. welcome. so, first, explain just how did the taliban manage this process of infiltration? >> it's clear that the taliban were playing the long game. so based on our interviews, when

members of the taliban, it's clear they had been working on this for years, for decades. so they managed to place people in government departments, ngos, international organizations, and for the most part, they didn't make them do anything, they were just there, sitting and waiting and playing the long game. then they came into action when kabul fell. we first realized there was something deeper going on the day kabul fell. it was surprisingly well organized. it was a big bloodlet. the taliban were able to quickly secure key parts of the city. so that was the first clue the taliban were a lot more embedded

in the heart of the capital than many of us imagined. then speaking to afghans after the fall of the city, we kept hearing the same stories, my neighbor turned out to be a talib. or this person that worked in the compound turned out to be a talib, or the security guard at the bank and on and on. >> so the big question of course this raises is this is a situation not trying to figure out what's happening in north korea, the black box country where nobody is allowed in, who is a foreigner, this is happening in afghanistan where there are thousands and thousands of american forces with enormous authority, hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of american intelligence operatives, thousands cooperating, tens of thousands cooperating afghan informers and yet the united states seems to be largely unaware of this. it feels like an intelligence failure on kind of a mammoth

scale. >> it's obviously a massive intelligence failure. you get feelings that intelligence agencies barely scratch the surface of what was going on in kabul and thus the rest of afghanistan. and we spoke to, for example, one taliban recruiter who was a student, he himself recruited some 500 people alone, mostly at kabul university, and his tactic for not getting caught were simply shaving his beard and wearing sunglasses and jeans and not getting into fights with more liberal students. it was that basic. and, of course, we always knew that the taliban were active in kabul. the taliban carried out multiple attacks in kabul. in fact, it was attacked the whole time.

but there was a perception that while they manifested in the city attacks but they were either operating at mountain hideouts or afghan forces under american backers fighting for rural land but really it was these people in the cities that made a difference. they were a lot more organized and, actually, a lot more sophisticated then i think many of us realized. >> this is such great reporting and sheds so much light. thank you very much. >> thank you. and thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. don't forget, if you miss a show, go to cnn.com/fareed for a link to my itunes podcast.

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hey, i'm brian stelter, live here in new york city, and this is "reliable sources," where we examine the story behind the story, and we try to figure out what is reliable? this hour some big stories ahead. is the white house press corp. being too tough on biden? hearing a lot of flak from white house aides, so we'll get into that with the president's liberal media critics. plus, the renowned reporter who turned into a stream right wing pundit, what happened to lara logan? we'll talk to one of our producers about that. and then covid claims the life of a world famous christian broadcaster pushing anti-vaccine propaganda. what can we learn from his life and death? that