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tv   Inside Story  Al Jazeera  January 31, 2021 2:30pm-3:01pm +03

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he boards in such a way that the big government of nigeria the peoples of nigeria still have a stake in the refineries officials insist this time it will be different but not judicial so hundreds of millions of dollars lost through the subsidy program say they'll wait to see how and when the government delivers on its promise but i'll just. go without is there are these top stories more than a 1000 protesters have been arrested across russia as they demonstrate in defiance of police orders this is what we've been seeing in moscow demonstration demanding the release of jailed the opposition politician alexy. froyo is in moscow she says the measures being taken by police in the capsule. the measures that have been taken the lengths to which they went you know order to minimize the numbers in
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order to prevent people from getting expressing their opinion very similar views in some other towns across russia we hear reports that petersburg which is the hometown of hootie and they used to tear gas and the teasers that they had been detaining there as well and the tensions keep on happening. very moment when we speak not only in moscow and st petersburg but also in some other towns across russia. because in belgium capital a gathering to demonstrate against coronavirus restrictions against the country's top lock down and its 9 pm curfew a ban on nonessential travel to and from belgium was also introduced on wednesday. police in the netherlands are bracing for more protests on sunday hundreds of already being arrested during consecutive nights of anti curfew riots it's the worst civil unrest the netherlands has seen in 4 decades israel will transfer
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5000 vaccine doses to palestinian medical workers us according to a government spokesperson the country has drawn sharp criticism for excluding palestine's occupied territories from its vaccine roll out for us present donald trump has parted ways with his lead impeachment lawyers a week before his trial that's according to u.s. media use accused of inciting the siege at the capitol building earlier this month and voices news agency is reporting that around $10000.00 foreign troops in afghanistan will reap will stay past the may deadline lives in a deal signed between the u.s. and the taliban senior nato officials have told reuters that the deal's conditions have not been met to fulfill security guarantees for troops to withdraw there's been a spike in attacks in recent months. with all the headlines of the more news here on al-jazeera after inside story.
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stop courting hope at 19 vaccines the world health organization warns wealthy countries against holding back supplies to developing nations but what's the solution when europe and the u.s. are struggling to inoculate their own people this is inside story. hello and welcome to the program i'm homage i'm joy i'm around 50 countries have begun vaccination programs against kobe 1000 but it's a slow process and many places makers of the 3 vaccines approved in the european
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union are struggling to keep up with deliveries pfizer by on tag astra zeneca and moderna have drastically cut back the number of doses to the block so the e.u. is shoring up its supplies by restricting vaccine exports to 100 nations but that seems a key to set a color and to bring names upon them and under the control and the looting that seems to our citizens is the most critical thought that i know. this is a taste against the clock we cannot close them because of that seems not being delivered on a great schedule. she was this they need to ensure that all advance purchase agreements for vaccines made by as a utopian union or not. the pay is companies to increase production and not we expect them to do it the export control angered britain after the e.u. announced border checks to prevent vaccines crossing from the republic of ireland
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into northern ireland in the u.k. the e.u. has since reversed that decision less than 2 percent of the blocks population have been vaccinated across the atlantic in the u.s. 8.5 percent of the population have so far received the vaccine president joe biden has promised to deliver 100000000 doses in his 1st 100 days in office but some states such as new york say they're already running out of supplies the w.h.o. says while wealthy nations fight over supplies developing countries will continue to miss out it's warning that so-called vaccine nationalism will prolong the pandemic if we heard about soon and if we are not sharing there will be sorry major problems one i say that it will be a catastrophe more than trailer and 2 it keeps the pundit meek bettany and street. the slow economic global economic recovery so it's morally wrong in terms of
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foresting the funding we could to intel and it wouldn't also bring livelihood spec is that what we want. all right let's bring in our panel joining us from the cern annalise wilder smith a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the london london school of hygiene and tropical medicine in london max lawson the head of inequality policy at oxfam international and from washington d.c. julie fisher associate research professor of microbiology and immunology at georgetown university medical center welcome to you all and elise let me start with you today what are the factors here that are causing the production delays and the delays at the rollout of the vaccine. well we are living with a challenge to produce the amount of that scenes that we've never produce to such an extent ever before. we don't need to cover about 5000000000 people and know that
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c manufacture kind of chief this so we need many vaccines and many vaccine platforms and several vaccine to develop this to do so and so currently i have you know a there are that can be technical glitches promises may not be met and therefore the current biggest hurdle indeed is vaccine supply and a vaccine delivery shortfalls max the world health organization has criticised the announcement of export controls on coal in $1000.00 vaccines produced within the block the w.h.o. says that such measures risk prolonging the pandemic w.h.o. is also warned about the dangers of vaccine nationalism how worrying is all this to you. i think it's deeply deeply worrying because the longer it takes to vaccinate the world the less like
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a we are to get to herd immunity the more likely that our existing vaccines will become ineffective but i think what we're seeing with the e.u. is they're getting almost a taste of their own merits and we are relying on a few pharmaceutical corporations who are seeking to have exclusive rights and have intellectual property so that means we're saying are to push you shortages of these vaccines if they were open source if the technology was available to all to produce them then we could stop and we could be mass producing these vaccines instead of relying on far as the who are making an enormous amount of money out of this crisis so maybe you have defended the rights of pharmaceuticals and now that's coming back to bite them when we see these shortages we need to see them smash down these barriers of intellectual property force the sherry of technology and then we can say open source vaccines produced all over the world as fast as possible julie from your vantage point when it comes to this slow and sluggish rollout of the vaccine
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in the u.s. and in the e.u. who's more at fault here the pharmaceutical companies or the governments. i am not going to call this blaming putting the government at fault i think going back to the point annelise made we have never attempted to both scale up vaccine production at this timeline and at this rate nor have we ever globally tried mass vaccination of adults. in a campaign that is designed to reach everyone so this is something we haven't done before that said in the us and in other places the governments could do a great deal more to help plan to grow the vaccines out so that the logistics and the planning are in place as the supplies become available and what we're seeing right now is a great deal of mismatch in the advanced planning at the community level particularly in the u.s. to be able to distribute these vaccines as they become available. anneliese i saw
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you nodding along somewhat julie was saying that did you want to jump in. indeed we can't find fault and there are there are now attempts for example for the pfizer that seem to be also produced by other manufacturers so i've heard about you know sort of give us those offered to has over their manufacturing capabilities to produce that vaccine and i think just a few days ago also novak just. finalized the contract on agreement to do so so we need we need to be creative and imaginative how we can rapidly scale up production so it is not only then they the production is also the country readiness countries need to be ready and have to national a vaccine deployment plans in place because this is vexed we are targeting a totally different population and usually tyga with our child
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a vaccination programs you know targeting older people tightening adults is also a different ballgame and we need to be ready and a double agent or has actually. a country readiness assessment and also country read him as tools and countries that really want to receive vaccines need to show that they can actually also roll them out max are there lessons to be learned from successful vaccination campaigns that have been carried out in the past. oh i think well but i think there was a very big differences and i wouldn't want to undermine the. point that they seized unprecedented but unprecedented telling the president to action one of the things we need to is the response to the aids where you so the mass production of generic meds is still a very different thing to vaccines but then the pharmaceutical the right to pharmaceutical firms whatever written and we saw the fullest sharing of technology
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and intellectual property something the european commission stuffed in to talk about it's really good to see other vaccine manufacturers start to produce these successful vaccines but so far it's a drop in the ocean you still got 2 of the 3 biggest vaccine producers in the world are not producing a single card at 19 vaccine at the moment and have no plans to do so that seems insane when we've got this global pandemic of a proportion that we've never seen before we need to see this is kind of a wartime thing unless we get every single factor in working producing vaccines we're not going to get anything like could immunity this year and we're going to stumble on into next year in the year of 2 with many mutations and many vaccines becoming less effective and it will be the people in the poorest countries where oxfam works that will be hit the hardest by myself lost a very close friend tomorrow in africa last week to cover it 19 this is killing people all over the world not just in the u.k.
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and europe and they will be lucky if they see a vaccine in the next year at least so we really need to go back to the during thought nothing was happening in the just demonstrates how this system of pharmacy school profits i'm relying on a few firms and i don't really blame the firms the firms have to deliver for the shareholders pfizer has to deliver a profit and they're looking to make $15000000000.00 just this year from their vaccine and learn that seems insane we can't have companies putting profit over people we need to people's back say no to profit faxing julie anneliese mentioned. her last answer that was just a few days back that the french drugmaker santa fe said it would help bottle and package 125000000 doses of pfizer biotechs vaccine of course pfizer and biotech are rivals of santa fe how groundbreaking is this and do you believe that we'll be seeing more of this type of cooperation when it comes to pharmaceutical companies and rollouts going forward. it is truly i mean we've used the word unprecedented
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a lot here but it is truly unprecedented to see rival vaccine manufacturers altering their manufacturing capacity to produce doses for another company what has partly made this possible is the innovation of the m r n a vaccines so although we haven't talked too much about the difference between the various vaccines on the market these novel that scenes that are based on new technology that uses them are an aid to working blueprints of the cell to immunize people directly that's the technology under the pfizer biotech vaccine as well as the modern vaccine the manufacturing is more akin to a chemical process like manufacturing of pharmaceutical than the very very complex manufacturing process that underlies many of the other vaccines made in a more traditional way and this new technology is both allowing that kind of sharing of manufacturing capacity to happen. and then making
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a platform that has made that very again unprecedented moves to share manufacturing capacity possible because the factories the vaccine manufacturers in a single facility can just only make so many doses over a period of time and that offering by rivals to share manufacturing capacity is an innovation and something that is allowing manufacturing capacity to expand in a way that would not otherwise be possible annelise max made mention a few moments ago the fact that the you know the longer it takes for evil to get vaccinated the longer it takes for herd immunity to be reached you know there are concerns that delays in vaccine rollout especially across the that this could allow the newer virus variants that are spreading very quickly to get of foothold and many worry that these new variants may render some of the vaccines less effective i mean how worrying is this for you. it is boring and the answer is simple we need to speed up so we can race against the development of new virus mutants and and
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weed so the class of evil it out that to and europe is not in a good place in a moment that we know the country i live in is as has less than 2 percent coverage yet so so in fact other countries like. the u.s. u.k. are doing much better than most of the european countries so so no it is very very worrying max you and i have spoken before about kovacs this is the international scheme that's led by the w.h.o. in the global vaccine alliance kovacs wants to ensure that vaccines are shared fairly among all nations aims to get more than $2000000000.00 doses of the vaccine delivered around the world by the end of the year is this something that's doable i ask because it's been difficult for callbacks to raise the funds that they need and there are many people that are that are worried that this may not work and also if it's just 2000000000 people that are vaccinated that's not enough also to get to the kind of immunity that you need to get to correct. absolutely i mean hopefully
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kovacs will be able to vaccinate 20 percent of the population of the countries involved and that's most of the developing countries by the end of this year 20 percent that's to every 10 people that's not really what i would call a breakthrough do i think that context is a good thing yes do i think it's enough you know i think we need to be thinking much bigger than that and then we've got joe biden and trumpets go and we can start thinking about i think these new technologies is you know the speaker was saying i think let me take them in the n.r.a. example we all know the facts they need super super cold temperatures to be distributed so it's not very useful in most developing countries all the vaccines of this culling to being developed the cures not wanting gemini's need to final phase 3 results they don't need the same refrigeration if these companies were
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working together instead of competing we could have much better technology we could have faxing be useful for the whole world on these vaccines as you say are incredibly important because they can be mass produced in a way that traditional vaccines combe i think we just need some creativity here and i think we need more government intervention and we are leading this entirely to the private sector despite pouring tens of billions of taxpayers' money into this these are these axes have not been paid for by private sector research they have been tight for primarily by taxpayer money they are public property and yet they've now been handed over to be privatized to intents and purposes and to draw is the boss and most of these companies and that's why we're seeing these ultra tissue schultz's is we're seeing out official rationing if you vike and of course rich nations of pushing their way to the front of the queue and even now we see fights between the rich nations and the crumbs are left for africa and the rest of the world i don't blame any rich nation for wanting to back. it's people i live here in
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the u.k. i have early relatives i want them to feel the hope the freedom from fear that the nation brings but i don't see any reason why this should be a tradeoff between the elderly in the u.k. and the elderly in senegal of the philippines where we could mass produce these vaccines if we stepped away from the system of intellectual property and exclusive rights that rationing supply julie in the us president biden has pledged to boost the rollout of the covert vaccines he's committed to getting at least 100000000 people vaccinated in his 1st 100 days in office he also wants to see 200000000 people vaccinated by the summer my 1st question is is this achievable my 2nd question is what's been the main impediment as far as getting a successful roll out in the u.s. as it is a been the fact that you know before now it was mostly state governments that were put in charge of trying to distributed amongst amongst their populations in the federal government wasn't as much involved. that is certainly an aspect of it
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because that to get the vaccinations to get to get the axioms or tool vaccinations are what are going to actually protect us from the cup in $1000.00 pandemic and allow us to return to something like our normal lives there are really 3 aspects one of them is the vaccine supply issues that we've already touched on here you can only vaccinate as quickly as you can get doses off the manufacturing lines packaged and shipped to the places where they are needed to be used and that that part of packaging. is not trivial there's only so much capacity it is rate limiting the 2nd piece is that logistical piece and you're absolutely right that as the federal government stepped back previously and gave states a great deal of latitude planning and allowed states and communities to adapt to their own local conditions and needs but it also left many trying to plan for in a massive logistical effort without any systems already in place to make that
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happen efficiently and quickly and some states have found more creative solutions than others on how to reach their priority populations to notify them about vaccination opportunities and to mobilize both to vaccinate others and to people in high high risk groups that are targeted for vaccination to be in the same place at the same time with all of the supplies in place that are needed and then the 3rd piece of that is acceptance we have a great deal of axion hesitancy in the u.s. and around the world some of that built on long simmering concerns about vaccine safety at a public level in some of among communities that have frankly experienced abuse from the medical community in the past and are are suspicious and not particularly welcoming of the opportunity to be vaccinated even though it's clear that vaccination is going to be protective of communities on the whole so it's all of
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those aspects. and elise i want to expand on a point that julie was making there and ask you to to talk a bit more about vaccine hesitancy you have vaccine hesitancy right now you also have a growing anti vaccination movement around the world how big of an obstacle is this for continuing to roll out the covert $1000.00 vaccines a few months ago i would have said it's a big obstacle but as time advances and i think the acceptance of the vaccine is increasing well quite and in fact we all queuing up lining up to get together that seems so in the moment i'm not so concerned because we don't have that seen even for those who are actually really one of the mexican. i would like to echo sorry go ahead and only i would like to add something else though you know there has been i think because the mit vaccines whether fest a vaccine to be about just that and ruled out i think there has been and do focus on the mit vaccines just yesterday 2 other very promising vaccines.
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announced that had a press release and i'm stepping down to advocacy reasons know about x. and and johnson and johnson and and yesterday also as as a nic i was approved by the european medicines agency that there are who are tools at hand down and they are much easier to use programatic lee are also scalable and and more convenient to use because they don't need to alter cold chain the quiet modes i think we need to move away from this focus on am i in a back seat and i really embrace that the normal banks in that are just now coming out in fact that now rapid succession also of other vaccines that are being discussed a debate or level to receive emergency use listing and i think that could be up to 7 new vaccines the next in the next 2 months so we need to we need to work on them as them julie looked to me like you wanted to jump in. no i just completely
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agree with what analisa saying that the focus only has been on the culture and requirements in the logistical lift required for the m r n a vaccine's the m r n a technology allowed us to get out of the gate very quickly and the production of all of these vaccines is it a speed that has been made possible by tremendous investment to what max said government support to take away that uncertainty for the private sector that does have the capacity to manufacture most of our vaccines. the vaccines that are coming astra zeneca know that x. and others are being shown to be quite effective and promising are much easier to handle some of them only require one dose and it is going to make that expansion by other countries. vaccination campaigns a much more practical set of logistical demands that again come in correct anneliese's other excellent point as we figure out globally how to make sure that these doses of vaccine get to all countries the next step is for countries to do
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that preparedness planning to understand from the point of receiving the doses at the airport how they get to communities and how they get to those who can vaccinate . populations as quickly as possible and then expand to the entire population it is not a trivial planning exercise and it really deserves a lot of attention and a lot of focus resources and sharing of what we have learned throughout our communities globally to understand the best practices and what has been most effective in using communications tools and in using technologies and knowledge so we really have to share our understanding as well as our resources max countries like south africa and india have made a proposal to temporarily waive intellectual property rights for cover 90 medical products that would include vaccines so that poorer countries can start producing their own versions of already approved vaccine. means you were making the same point just a few moments ago critics of this waiver proposal include the e.u.
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and the us home to many pharmaceutical companies is this something that could actually happen i mean you're advocating for this but do you see this gaining momentum and as a possibility what i think. i think i was the financial times said yesterday i think this discussion of the public option if you know i think the waiving of private intellectual property rights this debate is only beginning and if you want to look the e.u. has opposed this waiver as you rightly say and yet the president of the e.u. commission said this morning the british newspapers that he thinks they should use extraordinary legislation in the e.u. to overcome exactly those intellectual property and technology transfer issues so when it's a problem for rich countries suddenly intellectual property is on the table when it's only a problem for south africa and india it's an impossibility so i think if we've learned one thing in the last year and a hope it's that coronavirus makes the impossible possible this is completely heard
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of we've never seen this happen to humanity before all but i would also want to stress that you know by laying the foundations now for a more responsive i mean the speed with which you develop these vaccines is amazing and the public money that's poured into making that happen is incredible let's build a public system of production and delivery that is in quickly impressive instead of suddenly reverting back to these. tired and let's face it broken multiple of producing medicines and treatments which was broken long before covered 90 when you see way more investment from falling in developing fire agrah than in queue is from malaria you know these pharmaceutical giants i'm not interested in helping the world interested in the shareholders that's their role in the law if we can't rely on them for the future of humanity and surely that must be a key lesson from what's going on now and the key way to do that is to break
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through these barriers of intellectual property and we would hope that the e.u. would set me face up to his own hypocrisy now all right we've run out of time so we're going to have to leave the conversation there thank you so much to all our guests a doctor annelise wilder smith max lawson and julie fisher. and thank you too for watching you can see the program again any time of visiting our website al-jazeera dot com and for further discussion go to our facebook page that's facebook dot com forward slash a.j. inside story you can also join the conversation on twitter our handle is at a.j. inside story for me mama june the whole team here bye for now.
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i'm counting the cost the world's richest and the protests to reform the institution how much is thailand's king worth is the u.a.e. the next day to exit out of bag and coffee farmers in colombia struggling to recruit by. counting the cost on al-jazeera it's the u.k.'s biggest hospital with the eventual capacity for 4000 covert 19 patients built inside a london conference center it took just 9 days to construct with the help of army engineers dramatically expanding the critical care bed count and other similar sites on the way the actual london numbers could be much higher than advertised researchers say that huge gaps in testing capacity that the government is now trying to close extrapolate that across the country and the spread of coronavirus
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appears far wider than anyone thought. the eco friendly solutions to come back threats to our planet on al-jazeera. ready. this is al jazeera i'm dead you know with a check on your world headlines at least 1500 protesters have been arrested across russia including a like cent of all these wife. there demonstrating in defiance of police orders this is the seat in moscow where demonstrators are demanding the release of the jailed opposition politician xander god for his joining us from moscow with an update on xandra what have you been seeing. we are. well.

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