we're going to break it all down for you with the facts show today so it's sad right and. we leave the program in the united kingdom as the nation attempts to make its a vaccination efforts more versatile now the country is launching a new trial to explore whether using different coping 100 vaccines for the 1st and 2nd doses will show strong efficacy the trials will be led by oxford university and run by the national immunization schedule evaluation consortium now the 1st trials that will involve more than $800.00 volunteers above the age of 50 and test the effectiveness of 4 combinations of 1st and 2nd shots of the astra zeneca oxford university vaccine and the pfizer biotech vaccine results of the trials are not actually expected until june or july on thursday u.k. minister for coping 19 vaccine deployment that he was how we promised this would

not affect the current vaccine rollout and spoke about the work done to make sure vaccines would protect against the roughly $4000.00 variants of the virus all managed matches by an attacker but done a cool spot should cost money and dollars are looking at how we can improve them actually to make sure that we are ready for any veteran ramos out of batteries round are well over now and with tb and library of all the very ones we're ready to be able to respond more than the will to all be on any kind of bothers me present and produce next baxley. so with this in mind let's take a look at the state of the vaccine rollout as well as the trends and spread of the virus with r.t. correspondent science having her silent where are we thursday sybren here in the us as since the accident should have started that obviously hasn't been lying about.

27000000 people have received at least one dose of the cloven 1000 vaccine including about 6000000 people have been fully vaccinated now some states are obviously doing better than others for example west virginia they're leading the country with a 4 percent of their population fully vaccinated followed by alaska a 3.8 percent and north and south dakota add 3.6 percent it's now health officials are administering about 1300000 doses per day and that's on average and president by then he has promised to administer $100000000.00 vaccines by his 100th day in office and to achieve that the u.s. would have to administer $1000000.00 shots a day which they appear to be on track right and now you know taking a look at the numbers we're obviously nowhere near clear there is nearly 450000

deaths just in the u.s. over 2 point $2000000.00 around the world and don't forget we're also at the deadliest point of the pandemic while health officials they're warning that it's going to even get a lot worse with the new variants emerging but still president biden has promised some sort of normal a see a big part of that being to get people back into their classroom students and teachers but here is the problem with teachers are right now categorized as essential workers under the c.d.c. vaccination plan but states there are still allowed to categorize the vaccine distribution as they see fit so vaccinating teachers remains one of the biggest hurdles to returning kids and teachers back to the classroom right now 24 states 24 states they're providing vaccines to some teachers though some of those states.

now they only consider teachers eligible for the vaccine under certain conditions for example again in west virginia teachers are eligible for vaccine only if they are age 50 and older then there is a. limited number of teachers are allowed to get the shots if they have specific medical conditions and in states like texas and florida officials they have ordered school syria open for in person learning but teachers are not yet eligible for the vaccine yet both states you know they also have the worst of the outbreak right brant it how it feels being actually divvied up around the world right now so max and nations they have fast tracked in wealthy countries but it seems you know poor countries they're being left behind right now the makers of the 3 main vaccines that have the most widespread distribution that being astra zeneca pfizer an estimated total production capacity of 5 point $3000000000.00 doses for this year

2021 which would cover about $3000000000.00 people now this vaccine could cover another $500000000.00 people outside of russia now these other a 6 vaccine candidates if they're included there's a total of $10000000000.00 doses of the vaccine that's going to be available this year but it's also very important to mention that they're all at capacity so we're talking about $10000000000.00 max but most of this capacity that we have this 10000000000 doses is already spoken for by these countries the is this leaves a very short supply left the low and middle income countries and most of these poor countries they are relying on a program called kovacs that's an organization that provides vaccines for low income countries now under kovacs countries will receive doses in proportion to their population size with most going to in. pakistan indonesia and

brazil now the 1st of this aid in the form of vaccine is right now going to north korea where they will receive about 2000000 doses in yet in january in north korea they once again claim that they have 0 kovac and 19 cases. another one in this group is going to be iran that they're also set to get about a 1000000 doses brant are to correspondents have your excellent reporting as always thank you so much for keeping us up to date. and there is another legal settlement in the opioid crisis which is taking the lives of more than 4 100000 people in the united states since 1990 selling for mckinsey and company will pay out at least $573000000.00 to do its work advising oxic out maker producer and other drug makers to market the painkillers that the deal allows and can do to avoid civil lawsuits that could be brought against the company the majority of the settlement made with

more than 40 states will be paid right away while the rest will be doled out in 4 year lease payments beginning next year this is the 1st nationwide settlement made amid the opioid crisis as some companies have reached deals with individual states to avoid trial a $26000000000.00 settlement with 3 distributors and johnson and johnson has been negotiated for more than a year but no final deal has been announced. and a follow up to a story we did wednesday u.s. treasury secretary janet yellen said thursday that she and financial regulators need to work to quote deeply understand what happened with the read if you will game stop surge before she is ready to take action yellen told a.b.c.'s good morning america hater america regulators really need to make sure that our financial markets and functioning are functioning properly efficiently and that investors are protected thursday morning yellen met with officials at the securities and exchange commission the federal reserve the new york fed and the commodities futures trading commission to discuss the situation at time of

broadcast no further information about the meetings was available but let's dig into him for more details on this let's bring in tobin smith c.e.o. of transformative research and activity over and c.e.o. of optimist l.l.c. thank you both so much for being here tobin i want to start with you here the treasury secretary was covering bases today while on good morning america when she said she wanted to quote deeply understand what exactly happened here but it certainly feels like this all happened right in front of our eyes did it not i would imagine. you tobin you're very smart man you understand it so in your opinion the regulators actually need to address what happened with game stop. this is the 1st short squeeze that ever happened are you kidding me i mean it's a function of the business number one number 2 if we were like almost every other developed country and had our stock exchange you know on that internet thing so when you buy a stock and sell

a stock it closes automatically almost all countries have that we have 2 days to clear and what happened was was you got all the you know these new read it. in buying everything they were buying they were selling so when you when when when you buy something you have to show up a cash to the clearing agent when you're selling something it's presumed you're going to get the cash so they could balance it out what happened was is all all they had was buy orders they had no sell orders and they ran out of cash as a deposit so that that could have been fixed but beyond that brett you know you're too young to remember this but we used to have the same called the uptick in down tick rule in the stock market which meant that you can't short a stock if it's going down you know that's like football that's like piling on if we reinstated the uptick rule then we would take a lot of this volatility out and both parties here are acting like like this is the 1st time it's ever happened you could me i mean come on it's

a 21st century and we're still use and you know like guys driving their bikes through wall street and handing out stock show it octavio i mean this whole saga has been cast as retail investors would be in and sticking it to wall street but the wall street journal actually published a story when they tell the story of sun best management hedge fund which had bought game stock back in september and made nearly $700000000.00 profit after the surge so we clearly see this hasn't been all bad for hedge funds was it octavio. well not all of this is some hedge funds have long positions in the stock and so said miss was not by any stretch of imagination the biggest one so you had some like. ventures for example at a much much bigger position when the stock reached that. in terms price for the job was such $500.00. mentions had a valuation for that position $4700000000.00 now i don't know if it had liquidated i doubt i think they held onto it but nevertheless they saw their stock price and that absolutely through the roof blackrock is another asset manager who had

a very large position in game stock and so they did very very well as well and i don't know whether they liquidate that position at exactly the right time but i think a lot of these already it's river lucian areas who are taking on the big evil hedge funds for now scratching their heads and saying did we really want to enrich people at blackrock that was really what we were trying to do and i doubt many of these retail investors made much money with this i mean some certainly did go in early enough and out soon enough but i doubt many of them are such skillful traders that they have read the market that well in terms of when things are going to go up and down so some of them made money some lost money and there's a bunch of hedge funds who made off like bandits out of this so i think they must sort of be saying to themselves well is that really what we want to have happen not quite so they scored a bit of known own gold to put in and really we haven't seen a lot of stories about their relatives who spent maybe thousands of dollars and bought high and lost it all so we haven't seen that yet where they're complaining

about that but i'm sure as you just mentioned that have to be the case but i want to move on to the recovery here jobless claims total $779000.00 for $77.00 not $707.00 and i but i wasn't for the week end of january 30th a drop of about $33000.00 from the previous week and well below estimates from dow jones in fact jobless claims for the week were at their lowest level since late november if this is a sign that we're trending in the right direction how much does further stimulus actually affect this recovery. or i will to question number one we are trending finally and it's because of vaccines it's because it is you know winter there's things that have helped but the vaccine and the vaccination rate is almost 100 percent correlated with job recovery so you want more jobs you get more vaccines. you know on the recovery i'm sorry your other question was about the stimulus does the stimulus actually really going to affect this recovery moving forward yeah well 2 things about 40 percent of people households live in poverty or in work in

poverty work in poverty meaning that they can't pay all $10.00 bills every month it is going to help them it's sort of insane that my aunt is going to get a $2800.00 check because her income is relatively low because she's in a $10000000.00 mansion and so you know biden i think is got to come up with a way to say guys let's just not make this all about free money because from the politics of it free money is the greatest politics in the history of the planet and it it makes no economic sense from the other hand which is that we're now saving brigid you ever think you'd say that the united states has a 12 percent savings rate of household income we have 3 and a half trillion dollars of cash sitting in checking accounts that people didn't spend so this idea that somehow you're going to run out and buy a porsche or $2400.00 it doesn't hold water and we also have about

$11.00 trillion dollars that hasn't been spent from the last one so come on it octavio and if they were covered before we end here. with actually talk about the toll the pandemic has taken on the oil industry and we saw that this week at some majors it really taken hits in earnings but thursday prices rose due to the falling u.s. inventories and opec plus continued production cuts what is your outlook for oil at this point. well i mean the price of oil has basically sort of recovered to pre-code levels at least in terms of price but that's come with big production cuts so opec has been carefully sort of fine tuning its monthly meetings that they have now what exactly production targets should be and it seems that the producing countries are large and here in so you've seen a fairly large reduction in a now puts in sort of the supply of oil we've also of course in a big reduction in the demand for oil i think what we're seeing now is that factored into the price is sort of an assumption that things are going to get back to normal relatively quickly so we will start to see people travel again you see

the airlines pick up again and things that sort that seems to be baked into the forecast in terms of oil prices that we're seeing at the moment and of course that assumes the vaccines are going to work and they going to be rolled out and everyone's going to go back to living their lives away before and we've had some disappointments and reversals on the way so i would say the balance of the risks look at the downside for oil over the coming months as we sort of get this rocky road banks recovery tolbert where the transformer research and active you are in the of up with elfie thank you both for your time today. and time now for a quick break but hang here because when we return major tech firms are back in the crosshairs of u.s. lawmakers as they have to trust oh those have been unveiled just ahead we're going to break down the latest as we go to break here the numbers of.

i might. show somebody an accident where a car goes through what i kneel to sign at the intersection but suggested the witness said they saw stop sign stead of a yield sign. in these experiments many will adopt the suggestion we call it misinformation. claiming it as their own memory. at the believe the case near those who really can show you. show it thank you just because suitably.

that would that i suppose you noticed that i stated something that. you know nobody stupina bull episodes didn't go to see sheesh q you're the she's. doing your force well you could be me and my stubbornness to me if not thoughts about spirits i didn't do it was emotional 6 but i'm intending know. if de gea clue will. show us the stress of school schulman's for you to post here to a pub ice to move will those of us alone will know because the story could listen they will but what is. new york times says the wall street was one of the last bastions of power to be overrun by the populist movement because of the high barriers to entry and that's right those barriers that prevent eliminated because of free online trading because of all the stimulus tax that made a lot of people lots of free cash to have available to do something like this.

apparently $65000000000.00 in the war cost of the biggest health plan of the world which is right and wall street so they've got a lot of cows and energy and expertise to go after targets out there that they perceived to have stolen their money in 2008. when almost choked seemed wrong all right old old just don't hold. me to old to be yet to shape out these days to come to educate and in the game trade equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground.

no welcome back senator any closer charter has unveiled sweeping new f.h.a.'s legislation that would significantly raise the risk for companies like facebook and google the club which are who is now the chair of the senate judiciary subcommittee has proposed the competition and teachers law enforcement reform act which would

make major changes to editors law granting in force meant agencies more powers to impose bigger fines and shifting the burden of proof for companies over mergers here to break it all down is the us coast investigative journalist ben swan ben what kind of fines are we actually talking about for these companies and and how would they actually be enforced yes so that the fines are pretty significant in terms of upping the value or you know you and i talk about this all the time right that that's part of what's been built into these tech companies and their bottom line as in doing business is to say well we know we're going to be painful because we're going to break the law that's the way they do it and so they build that into their cost of doing business so right now the maximum fine that a tech company can face is $100000000.00 that is the current max for any kind of 80 trust buy elation what senator coburn char's bill would essentially do is increase that amount to 15 percent of the gross annual revenue of

a company so just do some mass they call it if you think about the fact that facebook has what $70000000000.00 'd what they did in 2018 if you take that and you say well 15 percent of that the year that's a $1000000000.00 so if per infraction you can jump from $100000000.00 to a $1000000000.00 there's a significant increase there where you definitely have to make them feel the pain if you want to stop people from breaking the law that's for sure now there's also pollution in the bill regarding the acquisition of smaller companies why is that in there and what would the changes actually be. yes ok bill things here the idea here is that you know companies like facebook and apple and google what they do is they just gobble up smaller companies and obviously there are a lot of tech companies that are being built for the purpose of acquisitions let's be clear about that it's not as if all these companies are somehow helpless they want to be acquired in fact for a lot of tech startups that is also in their game plan they launch their start up with a plan of what is our exit strategy and how do we get acquired but in this case what

makes it a little bit different is that if you think about for instance remember facebook and instagram there's a whole conversation about the fact that when facebook 1st approached instagram back in 2013 instagram's owner said later on in front of congress that he believed that if he did not sell to facebook essentially facebook would would crush them and that's how he felt at the time that's why he went ahead and sold instagram that's what he claimed anyways so the idea here is not that the government needs to do the legwork of trying to figure out whether or not this acquisition is good but that instead the companies when they try to merge or acquire a company have to show proof to the government in advance that this is not something that's been forced upon the company and that they're not also buying them up just to show for the company in order to eliminate competition well as i say when you talk about companies gobbling up these small little tech companies like you may not know siri was actually a small company created that for the purpose of basically selling it to a tech giant they sold it to apple and it's on every phone that apple sells now

same with google's deep mind ai those are all things that were developed dependently and bought by the larger companies now this bill also actually calls for authorizing $300000000.00 increases to the annual budgets of the department of justice and to trust a vision and the federal trade commission which in force antitrust laws how much of an impact is that big budgetary increase going to be. if you look at it it's going to make some impact obviously when you move $300000000.00 into any agency that obviously their main focus would be you would think on tech companies it doesn't guarantee that it would be but you would think it would be there something interesting go to the siri story that you told a minute ago and that's an important story but there's another cabby out to that which is that when apple 1st bought up the company that created siri they actually didn't buy them to use the technology they actually bought it because they saw serious a threat and they shelved siri for several years until one of their workers found it and said hey this might actually be good to include it in the phone and that's the other part of these big tech companies like google and facebook and apple and

amazon that a lot of people aren't aware of is that one part of the strategy is to acquire companies to use them there is another strategy where you buy of companies and you shelve them so that they do not become potential competitors in the future or your potential competitors don't use that new technology you actually sit on the technology so in theory you know adding $300000000.00 to enforcement helps to find some of that the question is will they go bust cosen investigative journalist ben so i will definitely keep up on this you know how much we love talking about it thank you so much for breaking it all the other. well with a new space race heating up at a weight of rocket launches being rolled 'd out have we entered the new age of privatized space travel well our team is john heidi takes a look at the evolving sector where billionaires are fighting for control of the stars and he files this report. if you want.

it started off well enough the starship asinine an early prototype for a rocket space experts carried the 1st humans to mars where they seem to be on track for it to transport it climb to about 6 and a half miles before then turning and rotating and then falling back down to earth crash landing in a fiery informatic in space explain the problem on a rocket engine malfunction the f.a.a. says it will investigate the crash and has ordered space x. to halt operations and is testing facilities in south texas while regrettable the mishap is unlikely though to have a major impact on space x.'s partnership with nasa when space x. joined forces with nasa it changed the lunar landscape proving that public private space partnerships are not only possible but viable with space x. sending the 1st 2 astronauts aboard the dragon rocket to the international space station last year elon musk announced recently also that he plans to send the 1st

civilians to space by the end of the year at amazon's blue origin and virgin galactic into this cosmic business blender and you have a nice hot space to have healthy competition and on that note the space race is heating up between jeff bezos ilan musk squabbling with the federal communications commission and each other for that matter over their company's respective satellites love to verify you have something behind me here to allow space x. to lower its darla. satellites in orbit a modification that amazon is objected to saying that would interfere with amazon's planned project hyper and amazons more than $3000.00 found a light perhaps a foreshadowing of the fight to come with billionaires bustling over space in a showdown that will be written in the stores. reporting from john how do you know that's it for this time you can catch a bus dog the man on the brand new portable t.v. app which is available on smartphone the tablets or google play in the apple app

store by searching portable t.v. you can also be downloaded on newer models samsung smart t.v.'s as well as roky devices or simply check it out at portable t.v. . that are going to learn how to not. let that much out of the mouth of the money they let you know. this was a good time to. try to move.

on why not. why did the old people. you. know my kids i don't want them up with john anybody at the moment i want to tell them about how to do it on a q so is it a little on the way to maybe we'll be looking at the people i don't want to put out a at the moment how do i know them other bloodletting. ruling class is rarely israel much but when it comes to china it is agreed the u.s. needs to so go get tough with beijing which isn't really me engaging china while trying to contain it isn't even possible combined ministration will eventually have to answer these questions.

knowing the words of. their who didn't walk the dog good job. and i don't buy that in a can matter a canard while. on a bad national. poll one of them who has. an affair. and. must know has said they could be put into bed all small and. not feel the need to try not to give us the impetus that although you love the most you know how to make you know the feel of the good. charlotte and know it when i

might. be my name a few of the. diplomacy years back the claim of joe biden in his 1st foreign policy speech as u.s. president at the same time to oust a tough line on russia. flagship english news channel is buying to the u.k. over ownership concerns. italy has the e.u. drugs regulator to fast track its assessment of russia's. passes europe continues to be plagued by vaccine shortages we hear from the head on italian n.g.o.s. you know they know you know my whole family received sputnik the jobs back in november and now we have a high level of antibodies we know that bush has great scientific traditions so we have no doubts about taking the job.