During the last presidential debate, President Trump expressed the conviction that COVID-19, the progressive pandemic that has stopped and continues to wipe out the world, “will disappear and, as I say, we are in the rounds, we are turning the corner. away. “
Since the onset of the pandemic, about 9. 3 million cases have been reported in the United States with a national death toll of more than 232,000; for the context, about 3,000 more people lost their lives in the tragic events of 9/11. Losing so many lives is really tragic; losing 232,000 is unstoppable. At the same time, over the more than two weeks, the number of COVID cases in the United States has increased by up to 25% in 40 states, and COVID-19 deaths have expanded to 15% over the same period, according to NBC News. If it’s America that’s “turning around,” it’s hard to believe what that word would mean, even if it might not cross a corner to rush off a cliff.
On the eve of a fundamental presidential election, we will have to ask ourselves: why is the death toll so high here in such a disgustingly rich country?What went extraordinarily wrong?
In the documentary Totally Under Control, directed through Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, they look to answer that. I spoke to the filmmakers of the documentary, which is now available for loose streaming through its distributor Neon.
JE: What is the origin of this documentary?
AG: I feel a lot of frustration in April. One of my friends had died of COVID, others had been connected to a respirator, others knew that we were in a very bad position looking to enter the emergency rooms, they could not enter. No check available.
He was concerned about some other assignment as an executive producer, with Matt Heineman, where he had his cameras in The New York hospitals. It seemed apocalyptic. And it seemed like the big challenge here was that there wasn’t a federal reaction, so I thought, “Wouldn’t it be vital to move on to that?”And to perceive how and why the federal reaction wasn’t working, so I made the decision to make a movie and looked for it to come out now, in early October before the election, to make it a way for others to consider how the federal government treated the pandemic.
I was applying for another massive task called Agents of Chaos, about the 2016 hbo election, I was just completing it and, anyway, it was a crazy schedule for an independent documentary, so I contacted Ophelia and Suzanne, hoping that they would be complete collaborators on this, because the only way we’re going to get there, so we could focus on it and do it. Not to mention three publishers, four. Fortunately for me and for the assignment, they agreed to participate and we started seriously in May.
SH: When the pandemic arrived, many other people started making movies, and many of them still do and are starting to come out. In fact, I had the same preference [ask] “what is the story I can help tell?”And I had spoken to some filmmakers who are incorporated into various hospitals, I knew what was going on. When Alex called, we knew it would be a crazy schedule, we knew there would be challenges. By the time we started, New York was absolutely closed, most of the country was, so we knew there was going to be an artistic problem. -Using to figure out how to do this and do it safely. We were able to combine a kind of dream team from other very hardworking and intelligent people, from our researchers to our editors, they were all like ”hands to work’, so [we made a movie] in five months and it was quite surprising.
JE: It’s a calendar.
SH: Yes. When we arrived Ophelia and I, our first assistant editor came, I think, a week after us, our file manufacturer started the same day as us, our editor started I think two or three weeks later, they all started the same way that it’s not usually the way you need to do things Array but we didn’t have time to find a formula to take the media to 3 and 4 publishers elsewhere was a challenge huge and massive . . . I wouldn’t propose it in general circumstances.
JE: And it was secretly filmed.
Oh, that’s right. We didn’t make it public because we were just looking for key interviews and obviously didn’t need to communicate publicly about the film, just because . . . someone communicates about the movie, has other concepts and doesn’t necessarily know what movie you’re making. This can scare other people you’re looking to get [for the documentary]. For those reasons, we didn’t promote it until the movie’s over, really.
JE: How did the interviewees think?
SH: We started doing a lot of studies. Our main goal was to attract other people who were the number one resources themselves. The dream situation was other people in the White House working group, some of them at HHS and CDC, the real resolution creators, and as seen in the film, some of them had them, some of them we had, some of them didn’t, because when we learned that the CDC was being silenced through the White House , they were not allowed to speak to the press. They were not even allowed to publish studies without White House approval.
Fortunately, when we started, there were already some amazing reports. Don’t forget that one of the first things I read was about “Red Dawn” emails. It was this panel discussion thread of epidemiologists, science experts and within government, who from January began [to] focus their concepts on “this is what we think is going on; this is what our colleagues in China are telling us; this is what we believe the government deserves to do . . . and ended up being a very attractive source to notice to other people who ended up participating in the film. [He also reported], you know, what did the experts know about January?And the other people in the federal government knew that too?And why didn’t they take the measures passed through the scientists?
JE: What are the things that came to light that management could have done to make a significant difference in our reaction to COVID and our results?
AG: The most vital thing is checks. I think we now know that there is a bureaucratic error similar to the quality of a detail of the COVID check, of course it’s horrible, it’s even an irony. But what we know now is that even though it interrupted the controls for 3 weeks (i. e. when the disease spread, so we didn’t have our eyes on how it spread), the solution was put into a solution that they may have done 3 weeks ago, it’s a very undeniable solution. Forget about the non-functioning check component.
For me, the scariest thing we found was the highest probability that this management intentionally slowed down verification for political reasons, because. [They thought] if you don’t do a check and you don’t know how many other people are sick, and maybe everything will pass, other people might not be so disappointed and the economy will be fine. The irony is that the slowness of the controls is what allowed the disease to spread, it put us all in danger. it may have been done intentionally is terrifying. That is the most vital thing for me.
OH: I think another big mistake and failure of the government was not paying attention to scientists and not giving them a platform to communicate with other Americans. If you look at the reaction of other countries, or even the reaction of the US government to past epidemics like the H1N1 flu or Ebola, it is the scientists who speak to the public. When you have those daily reports, other people want to hear from scientists, but in America, other people listened to politicians.
At first, management got rid of email scientists and absolutely removed data from the White House. People didn’t know what they could trust. CDC under these conditions is meant to be the company that talks to others and provides messages, [and] the message has to be very clear. At the same time, arrayarrayarray got one thing from the CDC, one thing from the White House, one thing about that, and other people were incredibly confused. Leaving scientists aside, don’t let them communicate with the public. . . I think Array . . . it’s a massive failure.
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Until Election Day, you can view Totally Under Control on the Neon website, and it is now available to stream on Hulu.
Jeff Ewing is a filmmaker and screenwriter in Los Angeles. My recent e-book co-edited “Alien and Philosophy” can be discovered here. Take a look at me here and stay with me on Twitter!
Jeff Ewing is a filmmaker and screenwriter in Los Angeles. My recent e-book co-edited “Alien and Philosophy” can be discovered here. Take a look at me here and stay with me on Twitter!