'They refused to act': inside a chilling
documentary on Trump's bungled Covid-19 response
Documentary
films
Totally Under Control recounts the early days of the
pandemic in the US, revealing in clinical detail a disastrous federal response
to a preventable crisis
Adrian
Horton
Tue 13 Oct
2020 07.10 BST
In May, as
their city began to emerge from the paralyzing grip of coronavirus that killed
over 33,000 residents, New York City-based film-makers Alex Gibney, Ophelia
Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger started retracing still-raw recent history on
film. They tracked whistleblowers, and noted comparisons between the disastrous
sprawl of coronavirus in the US and South Korea, which received their first
positive coronavirus diagnoses on the same day: 20 January. Meetings were held
by Zoom, interviews by remote camera draped by a shower curtain — a large,
amorphous ghost, compliant with quickly adopted social distancing guidelines.
The
resulting film, Totally Under Control, is a clinical, point-by-point recounting
of America’s preventable slide into the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a damning
list of mistakes, foreseeable crises, and political squabbling splayed across a
coherent timeline intended to be released just ahead of the election, “so that
people could render a judgment about how the federal response had been”, Gibney
told the Guardian.
The
two-hour film focuses primarily on the early days of the pandemic: the missed
opportunities from January through April which led to America’s spiraling
coronavirus present, an unending “first wave”. Though there’s plenty of sense
still to be made from the pandemic summer – the surge of cases in the US
Sunbelt and, more recently, an outbreak within the White House (a title card
reveals the film wrapped just one day before Trump announced his positive
diagnosis via 1am tweet) – the film-makers generally stuck to their mandate of
early-stage diagnostics: forensic re-evaluation of January, February, and
March, “because that’s when all the death, all the economic destruction
could’ve been prevented”, said Gibney.
“As human
beings, we forget things really quickly,” Harutyunyan said. “Especially when
you’re living through it, you might forget what happened three months ago.” The
film offers a chance to be “reminded about the decisions and actions made by
this administration”.
Through
first-person interviews, news footage and, yes, a literal timeline, Totally
Under Control visualizes the US government response to Covid-19: a foreseeable
mess of overlapping issues – some systemic, some deriving straight from a White
House more concerned with political optics and petty rivalries than accuracy.
The film includes numerous public health experts who raised the alarm in
January, when CDC director Robert Redfield privately warned Trump about the
risk of the virus as the president insisted, in a now infamous claim the film
takes as its title, that everything was “totally under control”.
Dr Rick
Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development
Authority turned government whistleblower, recalls asking Health and Human
Services director Alex Azar, a Trump appointee known for doubling the price of
insulin as a pharmaceutical executive, for $10bn to launch pandemic
preparedness plans in January, only to be denied and publicly undermined.
Lab
executives and physicians recount the frustration of flying blind without
testing for a month, as bureaucratic red tape slowed approval of testing to a
halt. Former Obama-era officials such as Beth Cameron, who helped develop a
“pandemic playbook” on how to handle an infectious crisis, and former HHS
director Kathleen Sebelius, explain how lessons from the swine flu of 2009 and
2014 ebola crisis went unheeded by the Trump administration. And Max Kennedy,
another whistleblower from within the Trump-appointed task force led by his
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to handle the shortage the medical supplies and
ventilators, reveals the White House response to be a farcical circus of
inexperience.
Not
represented, however, is the perspective of those from within the CDC or HHS,
despite several outreach attempts, according to the film-makers. After months
of unreturned calls, it became clear that for those inside the government
response and the CDC in particular, “their messaging was being controlled”,
said Hillinger. “What we were experiencing was being mirrored by what the rest
of the country was experiencing, of not being able to get a straight answer
from the CDC, of not being able to understand how decisions were being made,
when people knew things.”
Totally
Under Control identifies numerous errors and Trump-sown chaos, but focuses in
particular on arguably America’s most pivotal mistake: the failure to introduce
widespread testing in February and March, resulting in a “missing six weeks” of
fumbling toward crisis without the ability to map its spread. The numerous
failures – a botched CDC test, unwillingness to quickly scrap the compromised
test part and proceed anyway, FDA red tape which required labs to send
applications by mail, among many other roadblocks – squandered the critical
window for containing the virus.
What makes
the lost month “even more galling and infuriating”, said Gibney is the
existence of a pandemic simulation, code-named Crimson Contagion, run by the
department of Health and Human Services in 2019 which stressed the importance
of rapid, widespread testing. Yet the warnings went unheeded as the virus
seeped through the US. “They knew all this,” Gibney said of the administration,
“and yet they refused to act.”
Where to
assign the blame? In part, an American culture of scientific hubris, both
within and outside of the CDC. In part, bureaucratic agencies gutted of
expertise and experience by the administration, with heads appointed for
political considerations rather than qualifications. But the buck ultimately
stops with the president, said Gibney, one who has repeatedly demanded a
slow-down in testing to lower America’s official case numbers. “Trump had the
obligation to speak honestly to the American people and also to marshal the
forces of the federal government to mount a response,” he said. Instead,
America experienced a “sclerotic government response that is amplified by
leadership which doesn’t seem to care”.
Gibney said
he recognized a parallel “prison of belief” between Trump cronies and the
subjects of his prior films, such as Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes (The Inventor)
and the Church of Scientology (Going Clear). “He runs his administration in a
way which prizes loyalty above all else, as if he’s kind of a mafia don,” he
said. “But then what’s demanded of people is that they begin to adopt and
absorb his own magical thinking.”
Retracing
the events also demonstrates the influence of non-elected officials who can
mold long-standing federal institutions in their image – Azar and Caputo’s
steering of information favorable to the president’s view, for example, or
Kushner’s feckless task force. “If anything, the pandemic has really exposed
exactly those kinds of high-level decisions can effect us in a very intimate
way,” said Hillinger. “When you vote for somebody, you’re not just voting for
them; you’re voting for all of the other political appointees that they may put
in power. And those people, and the decisions that they make and the way that
they communicate, have a direct effect on your life.”
Given
America’s polarized information landscape, it seems unlikely the film will play
to people not already familiar with or amenable to the truth of a mishandled
federal response. Still, the film-makers maintain that visualizing as many
factual reports as possible into a coherent timeline for the record is
justification enough. By presenting a narrative sequence of events, “people
will see very clearly that the problem here was not a virus that overwhelmed
us,” Gibney said. “The problem here was an inept, bungled federal response. If
it changes some minds, great. And if it reinforces the opinions of others,
great.
“We went
after a fact pattern. And we’re going to present that in a narrative form to
people, hopefully seen as widely as possible.”
Totally
Under Control is now available to rent digitally in the US and will be
available on Hulu from 20 October with a UK date to be announced.
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