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As a national embarrassment. Now on bbc news, dateline london. Hello and welcome to the programme which brings together some of the uks leading political commentators, bbc specialists, and foreign correspondents who file their stories to the folks back home with the dateline london. This week more vaccine options, more good news in the battle to combat coronavirus. But will its distribution be truly global . And as borisjohnson polishes up the british sword ready to rattle it again, is trump binding bidens hands . Joining us stephanie baker, an american, is Senior Writer with bloomberg. Janet daley, american by birth, but long resident in the uk, is a columnist on the sunday telegraph. With me in the studio, the bbcs diplomatic correspondent, paul adams. Theres a british joke from pre pandemic days about london buses which could readily be applied to vaccines against coronavirus you wait for ages without seeing one, then they all come at once. Last week it was pfizer biontech, this week moderna as well as astra zeneca, the manufacturer of a vaccine being developed in oxford here in the uk. The bus in london is neither as frequent or as popular as it was, as england is still in lockdown. Though the political discussion throughout the uk is over how to have a covid safe christmas rather than a covid friendly one, the global debate is whether santas sleigh will deliver vaccine for all. Stephanie, there are some interesting statistics on this. Joe biden has said it will be available for all Americans Free of charge and the british i think have bought about 335 million doses of seven different vaccines. But are some countries going to miss out altogether . Yes, thats the real question and it depends which vaccines actually get approved and across the finish line. Pfizers vaccine which theyjust acquired for emergency use approval in the us, that is incredibly difficult to distribute worldwide because of the extreme storage requirements for it. It needs to be kept at 75 celsius. I think that will be incredibly difficult to roll out in low and middle Income Countries with weak Health Care Systems and unreliable power supplies. You know, so, i think the big question is, you know, the more vaccines that are proven effective, the better chance we have of rolling out vaccines worldwide. I think the big problem is manufacturing constraints, if we only have one or two vaccines it is incredibly hard to ramp up production to a level that we need it. We were speaking to someone the other day who likened vaccine manufacturing to the car industry, and it has an incredibly complex Global Supply chain. Alone i think that is the thing that were going to be talking about in the weeks and months ahead. You know, for the uk, theyve ordered a0 million of the pfizer vaccine, only 10 million will arrive by the end of the year. All the leading candidates are two dose regimens, which makes it even more challenging from a manufacturing point of view. In the uk, that means only 5 Million People by the end of the year will be able to get vaccinated, and that will only include, at the first stage, elderly people in care homes, Health Workers and then by age going down, over 80, over 75, over 65. But it wont be enough for several months. Until we get more vaccines approved and more manufacturing online. Paul, the logistical challenges are considerable. We have oxfam, i think, saying during the course of the week that they estimated about 30 of the global population, or countries representing 30 of the global population had already signed up more than 50 of the doses from the five vaccines that have actually got to Clinical Trial stage. On that basis, how is the rest of the world going to be helped . Its something borisjohnson is talking about this weekend at the 620 summit. Vaccine nationalism, it is a phrase weve already heard and i think we will hear a lot more of it. When you bear mind that kovacs, this collection of countries and organisations public and private partnerships, trying to generate 2 billion doses by the end of 2021, which they think is enough to vaccinate 20 of the global population. The chief executive of this programme says that if the first 2 billion doses are distributed proportionally by national population, worldwide deaths would reduce by 61 . That raises a whole host of questions, how do you proportionally distribute it . Do you aim for hotspots . Say you have x percentage of the global population and the distribution issues stephanie raised, bill gates was talking about that in the us alone this week, reckoning that the situation there was incredibly dysfunctional. We have achieved this extraordinary thing, baking this complicated cake. Now the question is, how do you bake that cake and give it to everyone in the world . Everybody wants a slice, janet. Astrazeneca has said developing countries will get two thirds of the doses available for its vaccine. In a sense, there is some enlightened self interest in all of this. If we want global trade to properly restart, certainly if we want Global Travel to restart, there is no point saying to poorer countries, look, you willjust have to deal, live with covid, because one way or another it will come back to the developed countries, too. There is absolutely no question in my mind that this will be distributed in an effective way within, i would say, six months max, but can ijust introduce maybe as a wider, more speculative dimension to this, that one of the reasons it has so enormously lifted the sense of public optimism and morale is that there has been an extraordinary, almost medieval kind of fear and superstition that has prevailed since this apparently incomprehensible evil force was unleashed on the world from we know not where, specifically. Now there is the sense there has been a triumph, if you like, of human intellect, the kind of progress that weve always expected since the age of reason. Human ingenuity has triumphed. That sense of powerlessness that prevailed, even in the most advance, developed and wealthy countries, where it seemed as if this bizarre plague could only be appeased by giving up the things that were most precious to our lives, contact with loved ones, companionship, basic freedoms that we have taken for granted in the western countries, anyway, for over 150 years. Suddenly, we seem to be back on familiar ground where human intelligence can actually get a grip on this. The practical problems, i have no doubt will be sorted out, probably, sadly, more slowly in some parts of the world than others, but this overwhelming sense of sort of philosophical relief, if you like, i think that is one of the things, even if it is not conscious or articulated, that has raised the sense of public optimism in such an extraordinary way. And if nothing else, that would be good for our collective mental health. Stephanie, one interesting question that has raised in the United States but applies to other countries, the role of the anti vaxxers, those that are convinced that vaccination is an evil in itself. I saw figures from a us Gallup Survey done at the end of september that suggests only about 50 , even if it was free, would sign up for it. That had fallen from a figure of about 66 . How on earth the governments, more importantly, the rest of us, combat that . Yes, you know, i interviewed the head of operation warp speed, trumps project to get a vaccine, and he said that was the main worry on his mind, there is no use in having a vaccine if no one is going to take it. There needs to be a coordinated Public Education campaign and messaging around a vaccination programme, to counteract this. I think it is going to be incredibly difficult, because of the amount of disinformation circulating on social media. I dont think that governments around the world are putting enough attention on this very issue. Hopefully, as these vaccines go through the regulatory process and the safety data is pored over by experts, we will get increasing amounts of information as people get vaccinated. Hopefully there will not be any problems and people will be eager to get their shot as a way of resuming their normal lives. I do think that people will be eager to resume, to get back a sense of normalcy to their lives, and that will be a driver behind vaccination. I would echo what janet says, i think this is a huge leap for science, that they were able to come up with a vaccine in ten months time against a completely new virus. Although it has been done at an incredible speed, i think they have put incredible care on safety, gone through all the hoops in terms of pausing trials when it needed to happen, checking safety, you know. And the trials themselves are relatively large. Hopefully that will go some ways towards combating the anti vax movement. The anti vaccination thing seems like a symptom of the neurotic anxiety of the age, i think this terrible plague has actually crystallised this kind of terrible, irrational sort of anxiety that extends into the anti vaccination campaign. Thanks for that. Borisjohnson has pledged to end what he called the era of retreat by increasing spending on defence by £16. 5 billion about 22 billion overfour years. In a statement to mps thursday, the british Prime Minister said this would allow the uk to join the United States and our other allies to defend free and open societies. Which suggests mrjohnson is already pivoting towards the Incoming Administration in washington. After all, this was the week donald trump announced he was bringing home 2,000 of the 4,500 americans serving in afghanistan. The same number will return from iraq, too. 0ne insider told a us network the Outgoing Team is trying to set so many fires itll be hard for the Biden Administration to put them all out. Janet, how big a challenge does this represent forjoe biden . For joe biden . Sorry, i thought you would say for borisjohnson just as a footnote, i dont think boris is pivoting towardsjoe biden, i think is pivoting towards half of his party. I mean, he did the Green Energy Package for one half of his party, or not even half, but a proportion of it, and now this military spending i think has been planned he has had it in his mind for quite some time. I think it is to do with satisfying a considerable wing of the conservative party which has felt that the cuts in defence spending were ill judged, especially in the current state of affairs. The joe biden trump business, about withdrawing troops, you have to rememberjoe biden was Vice President under barack 0bama, who was also an isolationist, in his way. His failure to intervene in syria had phenomenally destructive consequences and he was also planning to withdraw troops from iraq and afghanistan. Its very debatable as to whetherjoe biden will actually, although he wants america to participate much more in nato and so on, in ways that we would welcome, its not really clear whether he would be a military interventionist any more than barack 0bama was. And trump is obviously doing wildly irresponsible things by withdrawing so quickly and leaving chaos in its wake, but so did the previous democratic administration. This has always been a big strain in american politics, isolationism. Its not absolutely unique to trump. Stephanie, some of the options that joe biden has fleshed out, for example we know he will rejoin the Climate Change arrangement, the so called paris agreement. That wont come as any great surprise. He wants to re establish americas role in the iran nuclear agreement. I was talking tojohn negroponte who had been deputy to stay and work with the president said that some of the things trump is they might play tojoe bidens advantage, like tightening restrictions against iran before he leaves office. Biden has more leverage to get them to be more cooperative than perhaps they were last time. That is true and biden will face difficulty rejoining the iran nuclear deal. He said he will only do so if iran returns to compliance. He is facing a huge crisis in iran. Irans stockpile of enriched uranium has surged under the Trump Administration, since trump withdrew from the deal, so i think he is facing real challenges there. The question is whether or not he is politically able to reverse some of the things trump has put in place, whether that is possible or whether or not, as you say, he gets more leverage to try and strike a deal with iran, which is now quite desperate and suffering from economic sanctions. There is one example, i think trump put sanctions on banks providing humanitarian aid to iran, that is an easy one to flip. There are ones that are more politically difficult for him to do. Going back to the issue of uk us relations, if borisjohnson really wants to get into bidens good books, defence spending is not really the way to go. He ought to be making sure he has a brexit plan that does not threaten the good friday agreement. Biden is irish catholic, he has said very clearly he will not move forward with a us uk trade deal if the terms of brexit threaten peace in Northern Ireland, so i think that is an incredibly important thing. Broadly speaking, i think johnson and biden do have Common Ground on things like Climate Change, iran and perhaps even china, where i think they may share common policy goals and biden is in any position to build an International Front to take on beijing on a number of different issues. Janet . Ijust want to come in on that, there certainly is an issue about the irish border and the Peace Agreement and so on, but the special relationship, as its called, between the United States and britain, the most important aspect of that, and the reason it is notjust a sentimental trope, the most important aspect of that is that the uk and the us are the leaders of the five eyes Security Network. They are the most important force, especially at the moment when terrorism is such a threat. They are not going to abandon one another. The cooperation and the bond between their security agencies and the rest of the anglophone Security Network is huge, hugely important. I dont think that anything, brexit or the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement, whatever, is going to interfere with that. Paul, lets talk about borisjohnsons defence plan. This is enhancing the hard power, the weapons at the uks disposal. Obviously it is a Long Term Plan over many years. Criticism over the handling of soft power by two of his predecessors, tony blair and David Cameron, saying the proposal of the aid budget, the International Development budget, the department is being axed, would actually undermine that. David cameron even uses the word retreat, picking up exactly on the word that boris used about ending retreat on defence. We havent yet seen exactly what the consequences are in terms of the aid budget. There seems to be a general belief aid is going to pay a bit of a price, at least in the short term. Perhaps thats not entirely surprising. Theres also some scepticism, a little bit, about how this new money on defence is going be spent. Is it going to be genuinely transformational in the way that might affect the way British Forces can operate in the world and exert power in the future or not . Thats not my field of expertise. But i think there will be those who say that soft power should not be paying the price at the moment. And this feeds into the whole debate about the vaccine and how countries, how their attitudes are towards developing countries are and how they can be assisted in the recovery from a pandemic but also a massive economic battle. Take the case of africa at the moment. By and large, not suffering hugely from the coronavirus pandemic, but paying an Enormous Economic pace, with organisations now saying that the drivers for migration north, as a result of the economic meltdown in africa generated in part by coronavirus, is one more reason we should be paying attention to those aspects, rather than making idle boasts about throwing our military weight around. Thats an interesting point. That is something David Cameron picked up in his remarks, janet. He talked about the 0. 7 target, the un target that britain met in 2013. 0. 7 of gdp to be spent on International Development. He said, basically, he said this to your sister paper the telegraph today, its enlightened self interest, this is tony blair, neither the challenge of climate covid could be met without africa, nor could those of extremism and uncontrolled migration. To change it is a profound strategic mistake. Nobody is saying foreign aid is going to stop. The thing that David Cameron did which was unique historically was to actually set that target of 7 spending, which had to be met. Extraordinary things were given money at the last minute in order to meet the target. Were all familiar with this kind of spending target when local authorities they spend it on, you know, sort of stupid or unnecessary things. If you have a target that must be met, whatever your gdp is, however high or low, it does lead to misjudgments very often. To talk about throwing weaponry all around, we are talking as well about being able to protect Foreign Countries, we are being able to talk about co operating with Foreign Countries and protecting themselves. Having our capability, our military capability enhanced is notjust in our own interest, it is an interest of all our allies and nato commitments. The countries we protect. It is notjust a question of wanting lots of toy guns to play with. Lets move on finally, for a couple of minutes for you to you talk about things we may be havent paid enough attention to. Stephanie, do you want to kick off . Another consequence of the Trump Administration approach that could yet still have an impact, even if increasing number of states are saying no, he has lost the election . Well. I was going to raise the whole issue of what trump was trying to do on his way out the door. Basically, he does seem to want to go out guns blazing and light a fire as he walks out. One of the things that he announced this week was pushing ahead with this whole issue of selling rights to drill in Alaskas Arctic refuge, which hes trying to get done before inauguration on january 20th. Now it looks difficult for him to achieve that, but if he is able to get that done and signed off, it turns into another headache and court battle that then biden needs to clean up when he gets his feet under the desk. It is a huge battle and has been for years. This is one of the greatest expanses of untouched land in the us, so it has huge consequences, and is a real threat to bidens whole Climate Change agenda. He has a very ambitious plan to push ahead with the 2 trillion Green Initiative and, you know, how far he can get on that is a real question. This is one attempt to try and stop him from pushing ahead with that. Janet, the mere fact he is challenging the result is something you have a bit of a beef with . Yeah, it is extraordinary. This performance, this narcissistic frenzy we are getting at the end. I mean, the orderly transfer of power from one elected government to the next is a fundamental principle of democracy. This is very serious. We tend to treat it, the cynicaljournalists that we are, as an opera, but it is not funny. This is tragic. When you think the founding documents of the United States were probably the finest expression of the enlightenment idea of democracy that have ever been produced, and he is trashing them. This idea, is he going to have to be escorted off the premises . Like some dictator whos staged a coup . Will he attend the inauguration . I have never known a case, an ex president not attending the inauguration of the next one. It is hard to believe he would given the performance hes putting on now. And the republicans are in a terrible bind, because if they denounce him, although they are getting close to it, some Senior Republicans are getting close to it, then they are in danger of alienating this whole new constituency he has brought in for their party. It is a bit like the tories with their red wall constituency here. They have breached working class constituencies in rust belt constituencies that they could never have touched without trumps personality, and as a result, they find it very difficult to sort of separate themselves, to alienate him entirely. This is a very difficult position for the republicans to find themselves in. Paul, 30 seconds to tell us one more thing. A quick word about the fate of 400,000 merchant seamen. I notice this week samoan repatriated the first of several flights of the samoan merchant seamen who had been stranded at sea since this virus began. Many of those sailors, they are used to spending long times at sea, spending 18 months, two years at sea. These are the very people that keep the cogs of global trade going. Many of them are paying a very high price. Thank you all very much. Thats it for dateline london for this week were back next week at the same time. Goodbye. Hello there. Some spells of sunshine through the day after a cold and frosty start. Found in eastern areas because further west there are increasing amounts of cloud and outbreaks of rain chiefly for Northern Ireland and western scotland. A little damp weather for hills in western england and wales is held stop as well. Gusts for the Western Isles and temperatures will struggle across eastern areas but it will turn mild in the western through monday night that mild air will sweep across all part of the uk on this risk south west and when. Lot of rain still for Northern Ireland and a good part of scotland. Tuesday morning temperatures in double digit almost. Tuesday is a modest day of the week with rain on the north west, pushing south east woods by wednesday was this is bbc news welcome if youre watching here in the uk or around the globe. Im Lewis Vaughan jones. Our top stories the us says it hopes to approve and start distributing a Coronavirus Vaccine in less than three weeks time. The prominent hong kong democracy activist, joshua wong says he will plead guilty to all charges at the trial relating to last years siege of the territorys police headquarters. God bless hong kong and now was not the time for us to kowtow to beijing and surrender. Amost three weeks after the us election, donald trump comes under pressure from some senior

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