Transcripts For ALJAZ The Bottom Line 20240712

One was vincent luck a 55 year old father of 2 daughters it been an employee at the church for the last 7 years. And Simone Barrett silva was also killed the mother of 3 lived in france for 30 years she works as a caregiver for the elderly. Frances anti terror Prosecutor Says the investigation is looking into what organizations the attacker may have had links to. Given the nature of these acts committed against people targeted for the sole reason that they were present in the church at the time also the procedure employed and in particular the nature of the injuries inflicted on certain victims of the national n. T. Terrorism prosecution open investigation on the following charges attempted assassination and assess the nation in the connection with terrorist into prize and criminal association with a view to committing crimes of material nature against people. New coronavirus measures have triggered an angry reaction in some parts of europe hundreds protested in paris as france went into a month long locked up. There have been explosions near the capital of the nagornokarabakh region i mean Officials Say the military is blowing up ammunition close to its very fighters suggesting that bachmanns forces are near the city. The u. S. State department has given the go ahead to sell the worlds most expensive war playing to the United Arab Emirates congress will review the 10000000000. 00 deal for 50 f. 35. 00 jets zealand has voted to legalize euthanasia for november next year people with a terminal illness and less than 6 months to live will be able to apply for assisted dying but only under strict conditions. Well those the headlines the news continues here on aljazeera right after the bottom line which is coming up next. Hi im Steve Clements and i have a question in the last days of the u. S. Election is there coronavirus going to trump trump lets get to the bottom line. Over 1000 has taken the lives of more than 220000 americans and the number just keeps rising when this show did its 1st programme on the potential impact of the pandemic back on february 11th we hadnt heard of a single american death from the virus now in an Election Year dealing with a pandemic has trumped all the other issues on the minds of americans and how couldnt it in the end its about the life and death of those we work with or we live near or we cherish today we dive into this administrations handling of the corona virus and what it tells us about the mindset of the people leading america were joined by dr rick bright an immunologist in vaccine expert who had a front seat in government as the coronavirus pandemic exploded earlier this year he was pushed out of his job as director of the u. S. Biomedical advanced research and Development Authority i know it is varda after he raised alarm bells about the direction the trumpet ministration was taking and now hes filed a whistleblower complaint against the federal government and Academy Award winning filmmaker alex give me whos just come out with a film that documents the response of the administration to the coronavirus its called totally under control and the title comes from an actual quote from President Trump last january when he said quote its going to be just fine gentlemen its great to have you with us today alex let me start out and ask you when i watched your tremendous film that i think is so highly consequential about this time it reminded me of another film chair noble it reminded me of the assault on expertise on the on the dismissal of facts on the ground and i guess my question to you is this in your mind americas chair noble. Yeah i mean. Sometimes its very much worse i mean i think that. What was interesting to us when we started this film and it was we started the film just trying to investigate you know what was going on with the federal response to the pandemic it was like the old Buffalo Springfield song you know theres something happening here what it is aint exactly clear and we wanted to know what that was but as we pursued it and and tried to get to the bottom of it what was clear was that there was an assault on science and it was assault on science for political purposes it was the willingness politicians to try to corrupt the science and the science is what was or could have protected us and thats what was so chilling about this entire story because as real as rick will tell you the more devastating news here is that this is not a story in ministration that was unprepared in fact they had a rather robust playbook for how to operate under in a pandemic from the Obama Administration but even more telling they had a playbook that rick wright helped to write you know that was finished in october 2019 just a couple of months before the the pandemic you know we had our 1st covert patient test positive so the plan was there but they refused to take it off the shelf which makes it even more damning and disturbing rick youre one of the heroes in this documentary but there were others though the doctors in seattle i mean even the patients who were you know in this world of confusion but you saw them voluntarily going through this process when did you know that there was a divergence between the respect for science in the process and and really the political order taking us a different direction. Well steve is sad to say but i think from the very beginning i mean because we had practice in exercise and reviewed everything that would be required to respond to pandemic just a couple months before this crisis really started emerging we all knew and it was really in a meeting in late january when our secretary of health and Human Services like ses are called a meeting of some of his scientific expertise and i brought up some of those really critical points that we needed to do immediately and in that very 1st meeting is when those met those instructions that task lists for response was met with indifference as was basically ridiculed and pushed out of the room i read flagged as early with our assistant secretary preparedness response the one person who is charged with coordinating all the response for such event in our country in january 18th and said we need to convene a meeting and his response to me was i dont see a sense of urgency so it was clear to me that from the very beginning it only became even more clear as time went on that this administration the Trump Administration had a narrative that they wanted to believe had a narrative they want to follow that was everythings ok its not a problem its under control and i saw scientists saying the other wise that its not we have to act and each of those scientists was one by one pushed aside pushed out or just completely ignored you know i want to play a sound clip of President Trump speaking at the debates recently about testing we have to open up and we understand the disease we have to protect our seniors we have to protect our elderly we have to protect especially our seniors with heart problems and diabetes problems and we will protect we have the best testing in the world by far thats why we have so many cases let me follow up and so was the president saying weve got the best testing regime in the world what is the truth separate truth from fiction for us rick. The president said a lot of an important thing is in that sentence however the actions have not followed any of those things we havent tested since the very beginning we were months behind the curve in getting testing we were bringing in allowing people to come in from from china and europe without any type of testing or tracing system in place and we were very slow to get our testing up and running and its still not adequate per we need to get this pandemic under control we havent protected the old 80 percent of the people who have died from this outbreak in the United States have been over 65 we havent protected the vulnerable which are those with Underlying Health conditions or our black and latino populations we have failed in every one of those areas that you just saw that mr trump saying that we should be doing a good job and so lip service is one thing action is what weve been missing in leadership from day one alex let me ask you the same question when you were in the film you profiled the United States against a small much smaller nation south korea tell us about that contrast on testing ok well lets remember both south korea and the United States had their 1st positive test of a covert patient on january 20th United States doesnt have any kind of Testing Program until around late february i believe it was february 26th i may get that slightly wrong but late february. In south korea. They had a robust testing and tracing program in place on january 27th and 7 days after they had the 1st positive patient in seoul so thats a pretty impressive record now you know south korea was had learned some lessons as a result of its mers operate but we had learned lessons too and as i said before we had the. Playbook we just didnt use it and whats remarkable even more jaw dropping is we include. A section from a press conference in which. Health and Human Services secretary alex ase are described as you know how do you respond to a pandemic like this and he goes through test Team Quarantine Contact Tracing it all seems so smart and so reasonable the only problem was there were no test kits there was no National Plan there was no Contact Tracing when the whole thing was a mirage and so it it really raises the fundamental question of. Why because testing must be understood is the key diagnostic tool to understanding how an invisible disease that spreading fast you want to know where its going how far its spread its the only way you know and on purpose it seems the trumpet ministration refused to test in part because it seems that the Trump Administration didnt want to know how many patients were positive which is a terrible thing thats what allowed the virus to spread and i think is the greatest crime that this administration committed well you know another dimension of this film that made me want to pull all my hair out that i have left was the issue that when they did get a test out that an indicator had been added that was unnecessary and that was it was sort of one of 3 vectors that why. Was it necessary that when they finally turned that around as i understand at the end of some battles between the f. D. A. And the centers for Disease Control they ended up using the same tests that they had an old and so you had their how many weeks 56 weeks rick where that test that they had disavowed then got used how many people died in that period of time because our Government Agencies couldnt get their act together well it was teach us how part of that and why did that virus spread during that time because if we were testing at that time we could have isolated the people who are infected we could actually slow the spread of that virus across our country and in the secretarys i was the person responsible hes in charge of the c. D. C. Hes over the f. D. A. He has all of the resources at his fingertips and all the expertise all he had to do it any time was to bring up the problem and solve the problem and align the staff to get it done but he failed to do that again during this time he had meetings we had discussions about it but never once did he have that sense of urgency and concern that this virus was getting out of control he was in complete denial and just following the same narrative as President Trump i do want to i want to say one thing that emphasize what alex just mentioned when he said the secretary is i was on the stage saying the important things we need to do were to test and trace nicely and have a plan in place was critical to know is today in the bop to where. We still dont have any of that in place we still dont have a National Plan we still dont have a testing strategy we did not have a testing and tracing action plan in place so even though we can vote a lot of the issues that happened or didnt happen in january february march april were now not to run most november and we still havent put those things in place in our country alex you have done so many documentaries on essentially the failures of government the failures of ethics if you will with those that have been put in positions of power whether its you know the enron case or no end in sight with the iraq invasion and you know audit on jack abbott im off is this a case where people should is what weve seen unfold criminal should we see an accountability process people indicted for what theyve done or didnt do well thats a judgment for the department of justice to me but it but i will tell you as a filmmaker operating in the court of Public Opinion you know i began it is you know not to as a political film but as a film about competence and what i discovered was incompetence that to me rose to the level of a crime film and the and. And the crimes in my view again this is from the court of Public Opinion or fraud and incompetence rick. There is a section in the film that i sort of fell your emotional stress broke at a point and and if i have it remembered correctly its when. The government was planning to essentially flood the streets and flood the pharmacies in new york and elsewhere with hydroxyl chloroquine which has been since judged as as you know not only ineffective in treating cove it but potentially dangerous to some patients particularly brazil who died im just sort of interested in what that moment was and i want to convey to my audience how hard it is for a Government Official like yourself whos given so much to the public to decide to take the act you did which resulted in severe consequences. You know my whole life i prepared and play and had a goal to do everything i could to respond to a pandemic in a save the lives every every job every position ive ever tackled was focused on saving lives and when this pandemic emerged there are so many moving parts back Scene Development Drug Development Testing Development that we were trying to track and monitor and when i got the call from the secretary as our as office that the white house wanted us to to put everything aside basically and focus only on making chloroquine to drastic work when available bryden easy access to people across america it was it was a broadside is a slap in the face corporate all scientists and all clinicians however we did what we could as experts to try to put in place a plan that would include a lot of safety bumpers a lot of barriers to ensure that anyone who was exposed to those drugs before we had high quality Clinical Data would not be exposed to those unless they were under close care and attention from by a physician in a hospital setting and confirmed to me in fact that with this corona virus so lots of c. D. Barriers and we were comfortable that our Public Health leaders the people we put in charge in trust in america to lead us through and protect us through Public Health events would follow those guidelines and i woke up you know one morning to an email string that had a directive from the white house to take these unproven dangerous drugs actually it wasnt that they were just unproven and just dangerous they were also being shipped into our country. From pakistan in factories in pakistan and india that had never been inspected or passed save safety inspections by the f. D. A. But the directive was to flood the streets of new york and new jersey basically just roll these drugs out to everyone in new york and new jersey across america and signed off on that directive was our secretarys office of health and Human Services the f. D. A. Commissioner the assistant secretary for health the assistant secretary for preparedness response the director of fema who was also a leading major components of this outbreak at that point every Single Person above me put in charge to protect and save american lives and agreed to push this out at the directive of the white house i had no choice i did have a choice actually i could be complicit i can sit back and do nothing and watch these drugs go out and watch people potentially die from exposure to these drugs or i could break protocol and step outside our agreement our plans our structure in speak to the public in a different way and it was a it was a painful decision because i knew that by stepping out of protocol i was going to face retaliation i was going to face the ire of our government our president and our our infrastructure and in the department and to me it was more important to save those lives to protect americans and make sure everyone knew the real risk of getting these drugs and using these drugs in appropriately and mr as i did make that notification available the wrath of this administration came on me almost immediately within a week i was pushed out of my position i was sidelined i was muzzled and no longer in that active leadership role to try to stem the tide of this pandemic. Wow alex you know listening to rick and what he went through and many of the other people you interviewed one of the parts of the show that really struck me or was not only a Los Angeles Times correspondent in seoul but doctors in seoul korea that were looking at the United States as having been the leader for them in their own studies of pandemics you know the you know essentially looking at the u. S. As one of the great bellwethers in how to deal with these things and looking with with somewhat of shame and shock at what had happened and i guess my question to you is you know when you hear the chief of staff to the president of the United States mark meadows say were not going to control the virus now were going to just let you know im just as it is America America i mean this is this this is a serious thing as you said but how is this happening and how is the world looking at us right now well i think the world is looking at us. With a mixture of sadness and pity i mean we have failed utterly and i would argue you know we can look at the trumpet administration as being unique but i think actually the trumpet administration in many ways is fulfilling a dream of some you know. Radical republicans Whose Mission was to destroy the government well in the case of the response to took over had theyve succeeded they destroyed the government response what could have been a robust and powerful government response i mean you mentioned south korea the doctor we interviewed dr kim who had treated the 1st covert patient you know recalls that you know much of his studies revolved around epidemiological studies that were derived from the the c. D. C. The american c. D. C. The centers for Disease Control he remarked that the end of 95 mask and been developed by the United States the world looked to the United States as a leader in Public Health and now we are where the laggard 4 percent of the worlds population 20 percent of the worlds deaths but far more profoundly and administration that actually. Its almost does worse than nothing. In this context i mean you know President Trump on in the debate the other night said that actually could have been bad it could have been 2000000 deaths well that was one persons estimate for what would have happened if the government did absolutely nothing well this if thats thats barely a claim the idea that that youre better than nothing is the campaign claim but actually in some ways this administration is almost worse than nothing because theyre proclaiming proudly that theyre not going to have any kind of governmental response and this was not only in terms of the testing because you can you can see by the way in terms of. What rick said about drugs a clerk when when they want to move the levers of government they move to very fast to flood the streets of. America with high drugs a cork when but when it was a matter of fixing the testing problem which they could have done right off the bat they refused because they didnt want to actually reveal that that people in america had the disease right even worse was the socalled gerrard cushion or. Task force in. You know the task of finding p. P. Which which turned out to be nothing more than 10. 20 something volunteers on their g. Mail account on their g. Mail accounts googling where was p. P. And they went down to help what they thought would be you know a professionalized operation right scuppered that actually they were appointed to be the only ones who are going to be in charge of finding p p e for the doctors and nurses who desperately needed it to stay alive right. Well its very very sobering rick im going to give you the last word today and just ask you know the president you know recently basically we saw him again on the film that the president had talked to bob woodward the writer. Way back in january acknowledging the seriousness the deadliness of this virus my question to you as things stand now and were around the corner from an election the American Public might reelect donald trump how in danger you know the people involved you know the system you know the structure what could be just in short form the consequences to this country if it if it doesnt you know up its game. Sieber were in a lot of trouble were headed in per very major surge of the virus infecting more people increased hospitalizations increased number of deaths were headed into a really dark winter were going to have coronavirus cases on top of employees and cases our hospitals are going to be overwhelmed we need new leadership urgently thats going to put a Pandemic Response plan in place thats going to support the production of personal protective equipment to protect our Health Care Workers thats going to implement a nationwide testing plan and strategy thats tied to Public Health practices such as tracing and isolation we need leaders who will lead by example not have super spreading events spreading the virus across our country but instead will exhibit good leadership by wearing face mask and social distancing and encouraging others to do so if we do not have this change of leadership in change of strategy this virus will continue to overtake us we will lose millions of people have millions of people get in fact it and that original 2000000 number might actually come true if the trumpet ministrations plan is to throw in the towel and just let the virus rip through the population of america and that is what they seem to be doing now and theyre doing a very good job at that then america is in for a really dark winter a really dark season and were going to lose a lot of our parents and grandparents and its going to take a long time to recover. On that sobering message id like to thank you both for being with us dr rick wright a leading immunologist and virus researcher formerly working for the u. S. Government has just filed a whistleblower complaint and filmmaker alex gibney whos just come out with an amazing documentary on the way the Trump Administration managed the response the coronavirus panic called totally under control watch it so whats the bottom line when we meet again next week the American People will have decided which america they want either its 4 more years of donald trump who subordinate scientists and Public Health officials to his everything is great and totally under control political apparatchiks or to joe biden presidency which will respect scientists but still inherit a deeply divided country where an untold number of americans will die from the virus where Wearing Masks is considered a political act and where trust in the Health System and even in vaccines is in doubt thats the bigger problem and thats the bottom line. Jump into the stream and julian on Global Community bio diversity is bio security it is that essential for our species to survive be part of the debate i know you have ideas and he can be part of this conversation when no topic is off the table the police are not neutral and all of these cases goal here is to terrorize and heres the other part of this theres no consequence to this stream on out as they are. If you want to help save the world. Sneeze into your own. Counting the cost facebook is accused of being a super spreader of hate this information on lives so is it time to break up the social media giant bust the pandemic destroys 2 decades of Poverty Reduction we took the world back to the search for oil in the middle counting the cost on aljazeera. With the top stories on aljazeera vigils are being held across france in honor of 3 People Killed in an attack on a church in the east the suspects is in custody investigators say hes function is a and arrived in europe last month on these hellion island of lampedusa a 2nd person has been detained. Were learning more about the victims of the attack one was vance on look a 55 year old father of 2 hed been an employee at the church for the last 7 years Simone Barrett was also killed the mother of 3 had lived in france for 30 years she worked as a caregiver for the elderly