great. i know believes with ransom lawsuits i do that everywhere even though there are legal theories are often nonsense but let us this because the black citizens of memphis and they're not white allies are standing up to say no more of this and our middle races a controversial aspect of this pipeline and others like it across the united states is the use of nationwide permit 12 which allows fossil fuel companies to fast track projects like the behala connection pipeline the parent company responsible for the project valero energy corp did not respond to our request for a comment but the company has defended the project promising the pipeline will meet environmental standards monitored up a little al-jazeera memphis tennessee. this is al jazeera adrian finnegan in doha with you the headlines man. is in jakarta for

crisis talks with southeast asian leaders they're expected to call on coup leader blind and via the violent crackdown on protests jessica washington is into concept explains how his presence has been received. there is controversy about his presence and many human rights organizations have condemned the decision to invite him to this meeting but some analysts from indonesia say that the only way to really put an end to the violence is to speak directly to the person who many say is responsible for sparking this situation and there is hope that may be able to achieve that today but there are mixed opinions on how to meeting earlier in the year of foreign ministers and they weren't really able to achieve any sort of consensus on this issue india has once again recorded the world's highest number of new infections more than 346000 cases were confirmed on saturday the health system

there is close to collapse with hospitals short of beds medicine and oxygen u.s. health officials have lifted a pause on the use of the johnson and johnson coronavirus vaccine following a safety review they say the benefits of the single shot job outweigh the risks from a rare type of blood clot rescue teams are continuing their battle against time to find an indonesian submarine that's missing with 50 through 53 crewmembers on board its supplies a calculated drawn out search crews are working in waters around the island of bali with several other nations helping armenians around the world are marking the mass killings of the people that happened during the 1st world war these are live pictures from our media's capital of on where the prime minister and president are among those paying tribute to the victims.

and there's the headlines here on out as iraq to inside story next on counting the cost the climate emergency the price of going green and why it doesn't need to cost the earth to superintend unlike the leader of economics become the test bed for controlling house prices plus we'll go to concerts so why isn't one of iraq's biggest exports counting the costs on al-jazeera. already and saud's the european union wants to sue astra zeneca the company is accused of failing to deliver the agreed numbers of code with 19 cracks scenes but will legal action work who benefits and how much of this is really about politics this is inside story.

hello and welcome to the program i'm peter davi the e.u. is the biggest exporter of coronavirus vaccines anywhere in the world yet within its own borders the rate of inoculation has been disappointing the world health organization is warning that could prolong the pandemic major member states such as germany france and italy are all struggling to cope with another wave of infections while vaccination campaigns continue to be hit by delivery delays now the european commission is reportedly weighing illegal action against the vaccine manufacturer astra zeneca the british swedish firm was contracted last september to deliver 180000000 doses to the e.u. by the 2nd quarter of this year but it slashed its deliveries by 2 thirds of what it's calling manufacturing issues and obligations 2 of the buyers this was reportedly discussed among e.u. ambassadors on weapons day when most of them said they would support suing this

pharmaceutical giant. but several countries including germany and france well they were raising concerns the european commission spokesman neither confirmed nor denied the reports whatever steps are taken or would be taken these decisions taken by any commission together with the member states as again this is a strategy that we implement together with the member states so for the county to come into question we are only options which help us to ensure newsroom of course a spokesman for astra zeneca says the company was not aware of any legal proceedings but it says it will continue regular discussions about supply with the european commission and e.u. member states we'll bring in our panel shortly but 1st let's take a closer look at inoculation campaigns across europe the e.u. is vaccine rollout has fared poorly compared to other developed economies only around 10 percent of the blocks $900000000.00 people have so far received

a single dose of a vaccine but the situation changed this week with germany in the early doubling the pace of vaccinations following up to sit in supplies it's also decided to let general practitioners administer the jabs france italy and spain are expected to follow that lead. ok let's bring in the panel from reading we have simon club head of division of biomedical sciences and biomedical engineering at the university of reading in new delhi we have rajiv dust gupta chairperson of the center of social medicine and community health at john howard well nehru university and in copenhagen we have jeff lazarus head of health systems at the barcelona institute for global health gentlemen welcome to you all jeff in copenhagen coming to you 1st what's to be gained here for the people of europe if the european commission goes to court. i'm not sure there's really much to gain i see this is a bit of

a diversion from the real problem we have which is a lack of doses we need to focus on increasing production i don't know that the e.u. is that going to recover funds left in that and to divert phyllis's where astra zeneca vaccine is be supplied elsewhere if that's the case and i understand it but it doesn't make much sense i mean a pandemic isn't global epidemic and as long as the doses of be used that's the top priority the e.u. is producing yesterday and again eckstein in very few countries so we need to look at where we can up the production capacity so i'm in clark in reading is this just political point scoring big does seem to be the. critical point scoring yes i mean you have to ask yourself are. efforts to discredit the senate bill that seem insensitive if if if the state safety why it's parts of europe is it came to get over it the germans for instance. looking to. tell you know what

seem crippling they're going to the russians so it does seem a bit all right it does cooper in delhi from where you are is this a particularly acute issue in as much as there are issues of procurement and procurement specifically in india because you are going through a vicious 2nd wave of coronavirus there. yes it's a quite led set of issues as fires india's vantage point goes the 1st is that beginning crew india expanded the vaccination program so those 45 years and above and then beginning me in a more recent recession it's open door than dolls and that's 18 years and above which has obviously led to an enormous increase in the demand for vaccines

at that point india had only 2 axioms the astra zeneca went back to base aramis and the other one the vax vaccine went back to read about it by a day and only recently this what nic was given the are crazy asian to be imported initially what all this means is that there was a report as early as late march that in the interim government has decided that debate is not to be under court according to that report expanding the export of vaccines over the next couple of months and that's what we are essentially witnessing now it's also the case that this will affect the contribution to the cortex initiative of the w.h.o. which incidentally will end tate's 2nd the year tomorrow jeff moving forward globally is at the nub of this debate whether it goes to court or not or whether it goes begins going through a legal system and then they all agree and then they get beyond that there's an

issue here of contracts because coronavirus cove it manufacturing a vaccine that's here to stay procurement is here to stay as a global issue moving forward in the continuing fight against coronavirus so whether the contracts were woolly or flawed is the central issue what was written into the contracts that the e.u. signed up to or was it that the head of procurement for the european commission who has his critics a lot of them didn't actually spot that the contracts weren't as good as they could have been. well given that you know the contacts have really been redacted and we haven't you know been able to read them in death i think the issue at hand is at astra zeneca probably over promised i mean we've the world has never been in a situation where we've had to produce so many vaccines so quickly so other companies have also probably over promised but they're vaccines aren't necessarily

or haven't been approved yet so we don't know if they'll be able to deliver but astra zeneca promised a lot of vaccines more than that and more they could produce to to different countries so i think there's you know probably some errors made on the part of the e.u. part definitely some errors on the part of of astra zeneca but again you know the issue at hand is how do we increase the production and since the e.u. was making such a large purchase you know what kind of oversight was there during the entire production process at the end of 2020 you know and in the early 2021 it wasn't until astra zeneca made it known that it wouldn't be able to deliver of the agreed upon contractually doses of the e.u. suddenly it reported that they were sending a team to look into the production for me that was too late and 4 months later we're still facing this production shortage and as you know was just mentioned you

know countries like denmark and put up outright ban on astra zeneca last monday they reversed that country like spain is only using it for those aged $60.00 to $69.00 so on the one hand like simon said we're hearing that there's concerns in europe with astra zeneca even to the point of starting to discredit it to some extent and then we hear that we're going to possibly take legal proceedings due to you know failing to meet contractual obligations i think there's a disconnect there and i think it's a bit of a distraction so i don't clock in writing staying with that idea of somebody some place should have oversight would we not be in the situation. if everyone either astra zeneca and or the european commission had from the get go gone for complete 100 percent total transparency because you do one does get that sense doesn't on that astra zeneca doesn't really like to talk it doesn't like to you know come down from its ivory tower and on the other hand the european commission doesn't really like to discuss its procurement process or its contractual process and that's why

the u.k. has ended up 4 months ahead very quickly 4 months ahead of the rest of the european union. yeah very there is a lot of. smoke and mirrors around this it seems and people you're quite right ben might discuss what has been agreed jeff used the phrase we've got it for the contracts we don't we don't know what was promised or perhaps what was expected and reasonably are actually wrote from either party so until we get better window on that clearer view it's very very difficult for those of us were watching commentating in greece and of course the general public to form an accurate view that it's almost impossible. really from both sides i think you've got a bit of a game creating a bit of p.r. manipulation going on and it's really very helpful ratch of diskeeper in delhi if

jess lazarus in copenhagen has got this right and this is nothing more than a slightly sick big detour and politicians will bureaucrats passing the buck is that something that you're aware of at ground 0 of a very bad 2nd wave the politicians they want to talk about what we're doing but they don't want to talk about what they haven't done or what they haven't achieved and they would always like to turn the the anglepoise lights of inquiry someplace else. you know when the depends where the politicians are looking for counsel are looking for corroboration the asters a nigger's one commentator had noted couple of weeks back had indeed become a sort of a political football and despite all this controversy is the stop start in some of the countries over the summer but this aspect of trying member of the event the fact is that the asters and it does remain the work cause for many countries

including in its contribution to nichols 'd acts plus the demands the men just up there in india now as far as the indian domestic commitment goes it's only in the last few days that the government of india has made an additional purchase order which is a sort of a commitment of $400000000.00 u.s. dollars work will this elements of india and $200000000.00 to be added by a tick through to pre-book in a sense back scenes for the next couple of months and that's certainly going to have a bearing on what its international commitments and delivery is on those commitments would be jeff lazarus in copenhagen how much of the buck should stop with the european commission president on the line in as much as she wasn't great according to her critics when she was percolating her way through german politics that's why angela merkel abstained on her appointment as european commission president and

apparently reportedly it has been claimed in certain areas of the international media that the french president emmanuel macro actually quite liked the idea of having a bit of a rubbish european commission president because he could kind of filter through her lack of traction as president his desired goal for the european union and then along comes coronavirus along comes covert 19. well i mean nobody benefits from the failings of the european commission obviously the president is ultimately responsible for everything that happens but she has a large team and while it's true we have been procured like this before and have been problems for a long time and making joint procurements a reality in the european union and then this is a large commission with with many experts. and we would have expected that there

would have been over say during not just the contractual process not just the hundreds of millions of dollars investment invested in developing the vaccines but also in in assuring the production's again i would just reiterate that we are where we are and we're facing a shortage and if the european commission sued and if it was resolved quickly in the courts and if it meant that more doses were provided to the e.u. and for example in a country like india and they were taken from a country like india i don't think that would anyone given their current state of affairs in the massive you know transmission. that's going on in india right now so not really sure what they're trying to achieve through the court case and again i would be investing the money in production states because we know that there are production sites that could be producing the vaccines in the that aren't being used and that's still for me a great mystery why we're not producing whether you know asters and it is axion or

others and that france is going to start producing the pfizer vaccine but i think there's still more capacity within the e.u. and elsewhere to to produce the vaccines and i think it's in the interest of the companies there's been lots of discussions around patents and patent liberalization and licensing but i mean no one's saying that we're not going to pay for the doses it's how to increase that production so i mean does this feed into the understandable anger in frogs because to the day $365.00 days off to a lot. one in france france went into lockdown too and french people up and down france even in paris even slightly you know slightly left leaning labor supporting the for the french capital paris people were saying hang on we been here before we've been here frozen in aspic for a year and nothing has changed yeah i think the french population our own totally within their rights to complain that there hasn't been

enough movement on those t.v. if they were to look over the channel and see how pretty it going to be here they continue to do that i think though that there is there has been a story reluctance to accept vaccines in france compared to what's been see it in other countries but it certainly doesn't help that people like my numerical 2 of course caught the astra zeneca vaccine but was it a craze i mean effective there was a lot of silly. nationalistic politics bandied around and voters in france should ask themselves whether they were well served by that i would contend that the influence rajiv descriptor in delhi we can't know for sure at the moment whether the european commission or various european leaders and learning the lessons here because of their relationship with the supra national organization

such as the european commission but where you are what are the lessons that the politicians at federal level and a state level have learnt so far particularly because they go into this wave to no . this is a very important question and india is actually grappling with this question now. the various states and particularly the high incidence states in this 2nd wave. in a contrarian position with the courts that the high courts of 6 states have actually taken a view on how how things are going and whether there should be logged on so there are completely contrarian views between the court and the state governments on lockdown decisions at the same time the supreme court also has stepped in taken so i want to cognizance and made a case that disses a national emergency the point therefore is that if if anything that that the

lesson from the last year is and that's across the world that this does require central planning this doesn't equate require a whole lot of central core to nation but it also requires local leadership to be able to do for those to play out on the ground and that coordination seems to be wavering in many parts of the world as as analysis come out. jeff lazarus in copenhagen and we also may be seeing a time or we are entering a period of time where european commission bureaucrats have to actually read the writing on the wall and be aware of what's happening in the world because one of the cove it pardon me one of the davos summits not the one just gone but the one before that cove it had hit wonder lion didn't talk about it the american delegation in davos did they said there is this pandemic coming people and we have got to deal with it and deal with it together but according to the european

commission president oh she wasn't to talk about it she gave a speech about libya and about a small mini migrant crisis on the border of the e.u. with turkey and that was it has the time come for the european commission to start behaving like politicians instead of job for life bureaucrats. well there's are harsh words for it clearly europe and many other countries dropped the bar earth in terms of pandemic preparedness over the last decade but also in terms of you know responding strongly to this pandemic we've seen a lack of collaboration around the world and also within the e.u. among the member states we've seen a lack of solidarity and when we see you know when we see mistakes being made we see that they're not being rectified very quickly said i think it is a it you know a it's a warning signal to the commission that the population expects and the more

responsive more organized and globally that we're going to need probably some sort of super organization in terms of pandemic preparedness and i think did a great job at the beginning in warning the world at that they continued they were and continue to be criticized for their role that w.h.o. informed the member states already in early january 2020 and it took a long time for e.u. member states and many other countries to respond simon clark does this also expose a certain hypocrisy on the part of the drugs companies astra zeneca we're talking about today and also the commission seems to me that what they should be doing is one fixing covert to fixing covert 3 fixing cove it instead of going to court primacy seems to be that the european commission is a bit ticked off because the contract wasn't what it should have been whereas if they fixed cove it they could then go on to help other countries such as india

which are really heading into such a bad place right now. but i think this is really a political question rather than one of the pharmaceutical companies it's not really a business question because they are producing at quite a rates as much vaccine as they possibly can you know conscious flip a switch these things but it takes months to produce these vaccines a batch of these vaccines they can just be churned out you know it may be the next few days so maybe there is only so much they can do they are invested in production facilities and of course you have to remember that they invested in this production facilities when they had no idea that any of these backseats actually work now they would have taken some come for that from different governments so it seems really that they should have had. agreements in place as to what 3rd

agreement as to what was going to be produced and where even when you've got agreements like that you have to accept that producing these things is a biological process the things capitation to do go wrong so there needs to be something that's ability in ways that understand that really you can't always get what you want with these things and sometimes things go wrong so i think you need to be a bit more grown up on both sides about their expectations rajiv does this add to a preexisting narrative and i guess one wants to condemn bureaucrats and politicians because the takeaway for people who are living through coronavirus uncovered 19 is mismanagement misselling of a message and it's confusion and it's anger and this kind of legal process just feels that even more. is that legal process main the final analysis

is big quite simple slow us but something that perhaps god gets overlooked in this context is this magical figure of 60 percent that provides manufactor 60 percent of the global vaccines a reasoned analysis points to the fact that while in the aggregate that may be true for childhood vaccines but as far as influenza and this group of vaccines is concerned india's contribution to the global pool in the market that is has been around 20 percent and therefore it begets the question that was it over estimated to begin with it in other words where the as i'm since misplaced that's a question i suppose that requires deeper analysis very very briefly jeff last word to you 20 seconds how does the commission how do the politicians how to the drugs companies come out of this. they collaborate more to find a quick and effective resolution to the current situation the scale of production

and the us to discuss how they're going to work together moving forward to end this pandemic into the future again gentlemen we have to leave it there thank you to our guests they were simon clark rajiv descriptor and jeff lazarus and thank you too for your company you can see the show again any time via the website al-jazeera dot com and for further discussion goes where facebook page that's facebook dot com forward slash a.j. inside story you can also join the conversation on twitter handle it is the inside story for me peter davi and the team here in doha thanks for watching we will see you very soon. i. it's the political debate show that's challenging the way you think i want to know where you're to stand on cancer culture reciting the range of ideas that can be heard from international politics to the global pandemic and everything in between

is tech companies are the ones with the power what do we do what's the solution or get organized what are world leaders or governments missing about targets in like 2040 or 20 targets we're now up front with me welcome on here on al-jazeera. joggers in new delhi take advantage of the relatively clean air after weeks of toxic small stopped people from venturing outside institutions including hobgood say air pollution is leading to more severe cases of the coronavirus and more deaths from it and nowhere in india is the situation worse than daddy the number of record highs and where a desperate situation of the indian government set up a new commission to monitor sources of and pollution across 5 known for indian states health experts and badminton ascending one in 4 months of the easing of the lockdown would lead to an increase in who should and the impact that would have on those because of 19 argentina's wildlife is being jeopardized by industrialised

agriculture and uncontrolled cattle grazing to reasonable takes you want to jump into the event. to explore what's being done to protect nature and meet some of those determined to work on rewarding argentina told to al-jazeera in the fields. from the from venice of caracas to the battlefields around most of our job is to get to the truth and empower people through knowledge.

the. leaders from across southeast asia meet in jakarta high on the agenda how to handle the crisis in nam. but. hello i'm adrian for the give this is al-jazeera live from doha also coming up india struggles to get a grip on the pandemic that's sweeping the nation of 1400000000 people as more died

due to a lack of oxygen. all clear to us health care regulations.