Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, April 7th. This is your FT news briefing.

The EU's drug regulator plans to investigate Russia's Sputnik-5 vaccine.

Japanese chipmaker that's vital to the global auto industry is diversifying its business

and Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, finds himself politically isolated

in facing an uphill battle against coronavirus.

The problem for Bolsonaro has been the emergence of this very tolerant P1 variant,

so that, if you like, has completely thrown Bolsonaro's plans out of Kilte.

I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

The European Medicines Agency is about to launch an investigation into Russia's COVID-19 vaccine

and weather trials violated ethical standards. The EU drug regulator told the FT

it's following up on reports that suggest participants may have been coerced into taking part

in the Sputnik-5 trials. The Kremlin's sovereign wealth fund, which is backing the trials,

denies this, the FT's pharmaceutical reporter, Denato Palo Mancini, broke the story.

I think that would be a significant boost for the vaccine, which hasn't received

positive attention from European politicians in the past few months.

Whichever way you look at it, I think the outcome matters if not just for a matter of getting

the actual doses of the vaccine into the EU, which might be happening at some point, we don't know,

but also for just the mere fact that the vaccine is found to be ethically trialed,

it's safe and effective, and the EMA, which is one of the most important regulators in the world,

actually backs it. Denato Palo Mancini is the FT's pharmaceutical reporter.

We've been looking at the global chip industry on the show lately, and yesterday we did a

story about the world's largest contract chip maker. It's called TSMC. The Taiwanese company

...