Transcripts For ALJAZ The Bottom Line 20240712 : comparemela

Miss you ladies and gentlemen once again our country has been hit by an islamist terror attack once again this morning 3 of our compatriots in nice in this not. Very clearly france is under. The new sun to think if we are attacked it is for our values for our taste for freedom for this possibility on our soil to believe freely and not to give in to any mind of terror or so i say it with great clarity once again we will not give in explosions have been seen on the outskirts of state capital of the disputed region of the karabakh. The artillery and rocket strikes look to be part of intensified fighting in the region between azerbaijan and armenia diplomats from the 2 countries have been preparing for more talks to try to end the conflict after 3 failed ceasefire attempts european leaders are reintroducing strict measures in response to rising coronavirus in the sections france has gone into a month long lockdown spains catalonia region is shutting its borders for 15 days and germany nationwide restrictions will come into force from monday the u. S. Saw another record daily rise and cope with 19 cases nearly 84000 were reported on thursday the highest daily average since the pandemic began was recorded in the past week almost 9000000 people have contracted the virus that. President trump and his democratic challenger joe biden have been holding competing rallies in the battleground state of florida it was just 4 days to go until the election a record 10 Many Americans have cost the votes those are the headlines the news continues here on aljazeera the bottom line stay tuned thanks for watching. Aljazeera world goes inside the military wing of hamas gaining access to keep players in previously unseen footage on the list we create a different political reality or must we go through it really to do with new shifting region of the alliances we are asking the palestinians to meet the challenge of peaceful coexistence whats next for gaza and the palestinians gaza a mess and the middle east on aljazeera 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 and 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 us by a medical advance research and Development Authority i know it is barda after he raised alarm bells about the direction the Trump Administration 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. It 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. Some ways 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. Kovac patient is positive so. 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 there were 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 exercised 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 that i brought up some of those were really critical points that we needed to do immediately and in that very 1st meeting is when those met those instructions that task lists were response was met with indifference as was basically ridiculed and pushed out of the room already it 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 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 is under control and i saw scientists saying the other wise that is not we had 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 what 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 hour 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 alice 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 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 have 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 dont 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. 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 it 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 trumpet ministration 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 oh 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 wasnt necessary then when they finally turned that around as i understand it they know 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 there 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 lets see it is how part of that and why that virus spread there and that time because if we were testing at that time we could have isolated the people who are in fact it we could have actually slow the spread of that virus across our country and in the secretarys are 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 had 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 that secretary as i was on the stage saying the important things we need to do were to test and trace and isolate and have a plan in place whats critical to know is today in of october. 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 and april were now in on it over almost 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 seen Development Drug Development Testing development that we were trying to track and monitor and when i got the call from secretary as ours office that the white house wanted us to to put everything aside basically in focus only on making chloroquine to how drastic workman 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 it 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 had 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 well 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 were 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