gabriel's ando al jazeera new york, the caribbean island nation of barbados is becoming a republic. my cousin ties with the british monarchy prince charles is arrived for a transition ceremony, which will see queen elizabeth removed as head of state albedo, gainful independence formed the u. k. in 1961, it will remain a member of the commonwealth griffith nations. ah, this is al jazeera, these are the headlines. japan is banning foreigners from entering the country after the discovery of the new omicron variance prime minister for mucus. she don't says other measures are also being considered. tony chang is following the developments from bangkok, borders and are close to foreign business people and foreign students, many of whom were celebrating after being allowed back into the country several

weeks ago. far some japanese nationals will be able to return burg quarantine protocols are going to be introduced once again. so japan really stepping back very quickly there. that did cause a dip in the markets across asia this morning, although they appear now to have studied. in honduras, the left wing candidates seal mar, castro has claimed victory in sunday's presidential election. castro says that voters have reversed authoritarianism. her supporters took to the streets of the capital to celebrate her historic when the governing national party also announced that it's candidate had one man or a fellow has more is a bit of jovial environment. people very much happy celebrating. and we're val, or we've already heard from us, your mother counsellor herself who came in and spoke to her supporters stopping short of declaring victory would say that to day the people of honduras have one

and promise. i've got a minute reconciliation saying that is early as tomorrow she wants to meet with the under other candidate to form a government of reconciliation. a government that's really serves all of the people of honduras. the trial of george's former president's mika 2nd, really is sent to resume in the capital tbilisi. he says, corruption charges against him are politically motivated. second, really was jailed when he returned full max hall in october. and the caribbean island nation of barbados is becoming a republic. my cousin ties with the british monarchy prince charles has arrived for much for a transition ceremony, which will see queen elizabeth removed as its head of states are made us gainful independence from the u. k. in 1961, with the headlines stay, stay with this up front is next. i know, covering all of latin america for most of my career, but mil country is alike,

and it's my job to shed light on how and why a hidden pandemic within a pandemic. as a world marked worlds children's day last week, over a 1000000 children around the world are facing an uncertain future after losing a parent or caregiver to cobit 19. in fact, a recent study found that a child is orphaned by the pandemic. every 12 seconds with child welfare systems in most countries already weakened by lack of funds and resources. are we prepared to deal with this crisis? will ask one of the office of that report. but 1st, in the united states, the majority of parents are hesitant to vaccinate younger children. what's behind these out? and what impact could it have on not just children, but the wider population will talk to the director of the national institutes of health this week. headliner, francis carpet the doctor cobbler, thank you so much for joining me on upfront. according to a recent poll in the united states,

only 27 percent of parents of 5 to 11 year olds said that they were eager to get it back seen right away for their child. why do you think people are more hesitant to get the vaccine for children than they are for themselves? well, you know, it's interesting when you go back and look what happened when vaccines were 1st made available to adults. back in january of 2021. it was pretty similar is about a 3rd of people said yeah, sign me up on the wrong my sleeve and there are a lot of people, i mean, wait and see and think about this. so maybe the numbers aren't that different. these are kids after all. and i'm a parent and a grandparent, and when it's about your children, you want to be really sure you know what the facts are and you've been figured out the benefits and the risk. so let's see what happens over the course of the coming weeks and months. i'm not too surprised that the initial response is a bit muted. but when people do look at the data,

they will see because it's very easily accessible. now that these kids in the trial there are more than 3000 of them age 5 to 11. i got a 91 percent protection against infection from this pfizer dose, which was one 3rd of the adult us and had no really unexpected side effects. other than the sor arms that we adults have also experience. so it looks to any kind of rational assessment to be a really good opportunity to protect your child from this disease which can make children very sick, even though generally they do better than adults. that's not always the case. the risk of children getting a severe case of covey is point 05 percent. so why are cov, it vaccines necessary for children? well, i'm not sure when you give that percentage that that really conveys what most people worried about. is my kid at risk mean go to any pediatric. i see you in the country

and you will see kids. they are with cove, some of who are on respirators, as a result. and we have seen 145 children die. and these are kids between the age of 5 and 11 of cove at 19 a many of them without any predisposing medical condition that would have made you think they were vulnerable. so it may be uncommon, but it's certainly not unheard of for kids to get really sick and that doesn't even count. those who get covered seem to have recovered, but then have a long term effects we call long covert which can include fatigue and brain fog. that makes it hard for kids to perform well in school. so trying to balance this out, the risk of the disease versus some uncertain and so far not well identified potential risks of the vaccine. it sure looks like the vaccine is a better bit in the united states. covered 19 infection rates are higher among black, indigenous, and other people of color. so as vaccine hesitancy among the very same populations

for variety of reasons, including a history of being subjected to medical testing without consent. how should this be addressed? but it's a really important point in the u. s. we don't have a good history of health equity amongst racial groups. and so there has been a lot of effort put into trying to spread really valid information to those groups that are most likely to be skeptical. by the way it's looking like that is kind of working. if you say, hey, let's look at those who are fully immunized in the united states. the levels now for whites and blacks and latinos are almost the same and about 70 percent. so it got off to a slow start. but i think there's been a pretty good catching up as the information got shared. i hope that will happen also with children, but again, we have a lot of work to do there to overcome what is quite understandable in terms of distrust based upon past experiences that people from racial and ethnic minorities

that had with the health care system, which didn't necessarily seem to be meeting their needs. we have work to do here in that work that needs to be done. part of it is the information sharing that you talked about. the other part might be acknowledging historical wrong doing. do you think the medical community and the government has been an inadequate job in a sufficient job, addressing those those, those histories? well, people often bring up a really wrenching story of tusky, or african american males who had syphilis, were observed and not offer a treatment, even when treatment was known to be successful. and that never should have happened . that was totally unethical. president clinton made a formal apology for that back in about 998. another example that's raised is the heal cells that are used from lots of different laboratories to study various aspects of medicine derived without her consent. from henry and a lax,

a young african american woman in 1952. we had and i have worked really hard with the lax family to try to make sure we're doing bad part right now. they've become some of our best allies in trying to see how we can right those wrongs, but also make it clear that we do want medical research to be able to go forward and to benefit everybody. another source of distrust is big pharma. a 2020 survey showed that 32 percent of the american public viewed profit as the main reason that pharmaceutical companies are producing coven 19 vaccines. can we trust that the process wasn't rushed just for profit motors? well, i can tell you, having been in the middle of the process of developing these vaccines, that it was not rushed in a way to cut any corners. this was a full partnership between the federal government, academic institutions and companies. and we wanted to be sure everybody was held

accountable. so i understand that. so what it, what does it mean to be held accountable? that you basically have designed and conducted trials in the most rigorous way that the results of those trials are being evaluated by people who don't work for the company and don't work for the government. and they decide whether the vaccine was actually safe and effective. and that's what was done. why are companies able to make money off of research that was publicly funded? well, this is a complicated and challenging issue. we did at one point try to figure out ways that the government would have reached through abilities for any kind of research that was funded by the government. and then if a company made some money, they would have to basically feed back funds. and that is done all the time with intellectual property claims. but if you go too far with that, companies stop being interested in actually building upon the government funded research. you know, our ecosystem,

and that would have been the case this time. now in the middle of a global pandemic. would that have been the case, the companies would have lost interest or pulled back of if, if those types of circumstances have been produced, i think might have changed their approach a bit. i think you're right though in a global pandemic, everybody wants to help. and i know it's tempting to demonize pharmaceutical companies, but we need them. they, nobody else is going to actually put vaccines into bios or make pills. and if we want to see success against a terrible pandemic, we need them as partners. we just have to hold them accountable, we'd have to trust and verify that this is being done in a fashion that is scientifically rigors speaking of holding them accountable. one of the issues that companies like madonna are saying they won't enforce their patterns, but at the same time they're still not sharing the recipe, right? they're not giving the, the, the, know how of how to make the vaccine. so other others can't make a generic version of it. it's one thing to distribute the vaccines. another thing

to create the context in the conditions for countries to generate the vaccine, safely and on a why a widespread case. ok. what do you make of it? well, it's a really tough and complicated issue, but an important one. yeah, i know. in an ideal world i would want to see modernity be more generous with their ability. not only to say ok, you can basically use the information are patent, but will help. you will help you set up a factory. now they've made a commitment to do that in africa, but the time table looks like it may be quite long. other companies i think have been more forthcoming. johnson and johnson in particular now working in south africa to try to do more of this visor, certainly talking about so i think it's appropriate for all of these companies to have some public pressure to say, hey, you guys, if you're making a lot of money here, you've got a responsibility to the world to be more general. so you talked about generosity, which still is sort of individual choice. you talk about public pressure. but what

about government intervention? what about states actually making some sort of demand? do you think government's role is to intervene in this way? i think certainly governments ought to be able to apply a pretty strong amount of pressure, even calling this a mortal situation and calling on companies to behave and an ethical and moral and altruistic way. i'm not sure in most instances, because i'm not a lawyer what other labors they have to pull to, to demanded are required. i mean, part of the why i asked them, because my durn in the u. s. a. currently in a spent right now over the patent rights over the corona virus vaccine, which was jointly developed with the national institutes of health. madonna receive a huge amount of funding from the office within the department of health and human services, which now holds the vaccine recipe. so in this case, the government has the ability to share it with other countries. why aren't they?

well, as you referred to, there does seem to be a significant spat where madonna is now claiming that they have the patent on this coven 19 vaccine and have not included us government co inventors which we had in, i think, was an unfortunate step that they have taken and have been quite public in stating that. so we're have to see how that plays out if the government were also in a position being a co inventor on that. and then the government would have more leaders to pull, to make sure that it was made available to others. this seems like something that could have been resolved at the drafting stage of disagreement. the united states government drafted the agreement and the terms with modernity. do you think it was a mistake not to make open sharing a vaccine technology? one of the conditions, one of the times that sort of goes back to how things were worked out in the process of operation work speed. and i think there was

a great deal of attention there to trying to get vaccines manufactured and tested as quickly as possible. i was not engaged in the details of those contracts. i'm not sure i can answer your question. my question is, should it have been not, and i understand you don't know the details of what happened, but would it, was it a mistake not to have the open sharing of vaccine technologies. part of this a little hard to answer that in a simple way. what is open sharing mean? just like we were talking about before, it's one thing to say, we're going to share everything in our path than our technology and our recipe. but what you really want companies to share their expertise, they have a technical experience of how to actually build a factory and make that go. that's a harder thing to put into a contract. but in many ways, it may be the most important factor before you go. what did we learn from cove it or how can we use the information that we've gotten, the experience we've gotten to help protect us against future problems,

future inequities. when the next pandemic comes, that's a great question and some of us are spending a lot of our time on that right now. we could learn from this and should immediately be acting on that to identify ways to make our response even faster and more global. should this happen again, and it probably, well, this is not the last pandemic that we'll see. now we have a reasonable idea of sort of the 20 most likely pathogens to cause the next pandemic. why don't we start now to develop vaccines against those at least carry them forward to the point where we'd be ready to run a clinical trial rather quickly. if one of those actually emerged, why don't we develop a drug therapies, antivirals, for those 20 most likely pathogens, and move those along as well, so that we would have that kind of treatment available, which we really haven't had for coven 19 until fairly recently. all those are

things we could do in preparation. it's going to cost money is going to mean that people are going to have to decide. this is a priority and we can't slip back into complacency. but there are really important lessons here that we can act upon and i think we must verify the account. thank you so much for joining me on a front. i had to be with you ah, worldwide more than 1000000 children have lost a parent or caregiver to cove. it 19 in the us, more than a 140000 children are now orphans or one in every 500 in south africa. that number leaps to one in every 200 children in peru. it's one in every 100. according to dr . lucy clover family loss on that scale has not been seen since the aids pandemic tore through sub saharan africa nearly 20 years ago. given the looming gaps in vaccination coverage around the world, the numbers are only expected to rise and the crisis to grow more dire. so what's to be done to respond to a growing generation of kids without care givers. joining me now to discuss this

pandemic with in a pandemic is lucy clover. she's a professor of child and family social work at oxford university and an honorary professor in psychiatry and mental health at the university of cape town. she's co lead the cobit 19 emergency parenting response, and she's worked closely with the w h o unicef and other international in jo's and government organizations to support caregivers looking after children during locked downs and school closures. lucy, clover, thanks so much for joining me on up front. according to your research, every 12 seconds a child loses an important care giver due to cobit 19. but when the pandemic began, did you expect it to be this bad? you anticipate this? well, actually it was the year or so futile full of offense. hospital thieves can child fast identify this challenge. a connie up to season. hillis called me one morning and said these sorts about what's, what happened with ha,

and the fact that this is going to be happening with corvette and a mock. you know, i heard you say the numbers 1000000 children and one every 12 seconds. that was what we published in the lancet in july. but since then there's been a huge rise, even in those numbers, particularly with am surges in india and africa. and the numbers that we're now looking at a 5200000 children who've lost a primary caregiver due to covet 19 associated orphan herd. and those numbers have gone to one in every 6 seconds. a child loses a caregiver. while you talk about these numbers being on the rise, obviously latin america's been hard hit. as you mentioned, indian indian numbers are going up quickly. we've also seen it in south africa, it's in, in, in russia, iran, and of course, here in the united states. but what's the common denominator? what's the driving force behind the rise in these places? we seen huge surges because of the delta variant. we've also seen that some

countries are only just now able to estimate how many people have died of covered. we've seen deaths going to younger and younger generations, particularly amongst those who are unvaccinated. and i think crucially, what we've seen is the communities where that people have lots of children. um, when, when a, when a parent or a grandparent is looking after those children passes away, you know, not just one child is losing a caregiver, but often many children in that same family. a study last month found that in the u . s. one out of every $500.00 children has experienced loss of a parent or grandparent caregiver, due to call it 19. but when you break down those numbers according to race, they get down to one out of every 310 black children as compared to one of us. i'm 153 white children. it's a huge gap and digits, children. i had even harder one out of every 168. how does

a nation respond to this crisis when the burden is so unevenly carried? it's such an important question and it's an urgent question for governments right now in the u. s. but, but also globally, and the evidence that we have from this pandemic. but also from other pandemic, like ha, and abolla has shown some very clear responses. the 1st one is vaccination. in countries where we, where we don't have vaccines, we have to push term to allow access for, for people in countries where we do have vaccines, it's essential that people take them and use them and use other public health measures to protect them from dying. but we move them on to children. and what happens once the children has lost a primary caregiver with a 1st urgent thing that we have to do is make sure that they don't go into institution. there is very strong evidence that often a jens institutions have very much higher rates of abuse of sexual exploitation.

that children's long term outcomes are, are much more difficult. and so what we have to do is find them family homes ideally within their extended family. but to support families to look after these children, they'll be recently bereaved. they may be out of school. they need extra support and parenting support and economic support within that family. in your estimation, our government's making that connection between the need for social investment and institutional investment and improving the circumstances of coven orphans. you know, this is very new. it's very new evidence and governments are so many governments are still struggling to, to cope with the epidemic and to know what they should do. but what we started to see is that some governments are realizing how urgent this is. an coming to us to colleagues at cdc usaid pet far at the world bank at w h o to say,

what are our next steps? for example, the brazilian government are looking at recording on death certificates. whether, whether people have dependence and allowing then access to get economic support and, and social support to those families. we're seeing that the u. s. government is starting to, to discuss how they can best do this within their pandemic response. i think there are encouraging signs, but what we still have to see is one government step forward and say we, we see this problem and what we're going to rise to meet at chapters about the mental health piece of this. what are they held, the rest? the mental health as they call it opens are facing. oh, well, what we know about bereavement for children is that am a child who, who loses a parent or grandparent primary caregiver, so so many told, looked after by their grandparents if that child or adolescent is,

is supported and cared for. and within a strong and loving family environment, then within about a year or so that their progress, their achievement is, is back on track primarily that children are grieving, but they're able to to unstick seed with their lives. but what we also know is that if that bereavement happens and that child goes into a very difficult situation that there isn't care for them that they don't have enough. they don't have enough money to continue going to school. that that, that bereavement can be a point in their lives which um, which leads to really severe puppets. and we see, for example, on, in, in sub saharan africa, very high rates of transactional sacks. the girls are forced into situations where they have to get money. and, and that's the only option for them. we see girls being and boys being pulled out of school. we see children who, who don't have the kind of a you know,

that the kind of loving monitoring and support that, that, that we provide for our teenagers and, and that's a really crucial time. so let's pivot and talk a little bit more about the response to the crisis. we know that money is important, but how do we use funding in ways that create sustainable and effective solutions? or the good news is that we do have strong research evidence of what is an effective and sustainable solutions. what we know is that providing economic strengthening cash economic support has long term positive impacts for children and adolescents. we see on from south africa that child support grants, for example, lead to reductions in teenage pregnancy. 15 years later. we also know the parenting programs can be incredibly effective in the long term. amazing research done in jamaica shows that that children whose families received an early years parenting

program, 30 years later, those children have better education outcomes that earning more money. they are on have better mental and physical health. so we do have sustainable solutions. we also need to think about digital delivery and remote delivery. um, people may not be able to get to services, services may be closed, you to covered, people may been locked down, they might be in isolation. and so there are now ways that we can deliver services like her, like a grant or a parenting program through people's mobile phones when they can't reach those services. and these are some really exciting new ways that we can reach these families. what are some of the biggest mistakes people, me, or institutions, governments, et cetera. what are some of the biggest waste of resources that was? well, i think one of the most important things we've learned in the last 10 years has been that institutionalizing children who've lost a caregiver, is

a huge mistake. people have done this from the best of intentions, built orphanages, wanted to support these um these, these centers. but what the evidence is found there was a very famous lancet commission on, on the institution lies ation of children, which has shown that children consistently do better in a family environment. and i think that's a key lesson that we've learned for dis response. i think the, the, the other huge mistake that we would make would be not to act fast. when we publish this paper in april, there were 1500000 children who had lost a caregiver. now, in, in november there are 5200000 children. within the next year, there are going to be $10000000.00 children. we can't say that this is a problem which is going to happen. this is a problem already happening. and it's getting worse and fast. that melissa can

thank you so much for your renewal, for thank you so much and, and lovely to meet you, mark that is our show up for will be back next december on and just either guitar hose, the fever, arab cup, a momentous event for the region and a glimpse of what's in store for the 2022 world cup people in power investigates the use and abuse of power across the globe. a world exclusive interview with joint nobel peace, lori is recognized by safeguarding freedom of expression as a precondition for democracy and lasting peace from shore. documentaries, too, in depth explaining portal showcases the best of al jazeera digital content. as the year draws to a close,

we look back at the events that have shaped the news and look ahead to next year. december on a jesse europe. in the light of the open seas hides a dark secret. men forced to work without pang enslaved for years, but a glimmer of hope remained for the forgotten fisherman as a group of activists delve deep into the illegal fishing industry, demanding justice and freedom goes fleet. a witness documentary on al jazeera. there was since i was a little boy in india, my dream was to make bollywood fence. so finally i was going to do it one man's quest to realize a lifelong ambition. this story i chose was of my own village, and it's das permission going behind the lens as got him saying,

brings his personal story to life. al jazeera correspondent, my own private bollywood. ah, japan becomes the latest country to band foreign visitors in response to the new cove at 19 variance. ah, the i'm had, am i hear dean, this is al jazeera life, am doha also coming up miles very, very mild symptoms. the doctor who 1st detected the only con variance says patients of suffered only mile symptoms so far.