Transcripts For ALJAZ The Bottom Line 20240712

Least 28 people died and hundreds have been injured armenias accusing us of by john of using the weapon of White Phosphorous in the conflict over nagornokarabakh its districts its under International Law and so by john has tonights the Allegation Police in france have reportedly arrested a 3rd suspect went to thursdays knife attack a nice 3 people were killed in the attack at church. Thousands of protesters have turned out in pakistan to condemn the french president s been ongoing protests in several muslim countries after emanuel microns offended the right some religion in fact crack down on what he calls radical islam the president michel sat down with aljazeera to discuss the wave of anger. Welcome pauli something wrong so they understand the sentiments being expressed and i respect them but you must understand my role right now its to do 2 things to promote calm and also to protect these rights because if youre clicking almost equal to me what i want to say is very clear that today in the world there are people who distort islam and in the name of this religion that they claim to defend they kill they slaughter they make speeches justifying a kind of expulsion of human groups in the world today there is violence practiced by some extremist movements and individuals in the name of islam of course this is a problem for islam because muslims are the 1st victims and as i mentioned before more than 80 percent of the victims of terrorism are muslims and this is a problem for all of us. I think president Allison Watson has cast his ballots in his countrys president ial election to a position counter at some point whats in the votes in the election the smarts find the state stay with us here and ill just 0 the bottom line is up next. Its one of the most consequential elections in u. S. History and ill just there will be there every step of the way 9 hours of live coverage and up to the minute results as they come in with correspondents across the u. S. And the rest of the world aljazeera brings you a unique global perspective on the u. S. Elections 2020 hi im Steve Clemons 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 havent 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 us by a medical advance research and Development Authority i know it is varda 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 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. He 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 of an and 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 the pandemic you know we had our 1st. Coated 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 and 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 alex days are called a meeting of some of his scientific expertise that 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 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 primetime 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 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 and 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 at 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 aides 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 nobody 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 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 wasnt necessary then when they finally turned that around as i understand it the you 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 their how many weeks 56 weeks rick where that test that they had disavowed and 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 did that virus spread during 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 sector is our 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 or to test and trace and isolate and have a plan in place was critical to know is today in the bottle were. We still dont have any of that in place we still dont have a National Plan we still dont have a testing strategy we didnt have a testing and tracing action plan in place so even though we can solve a lot of the issues that happened or didnt happen in january february march april were now not 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 pandemic in a saving 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 part bryden easy access to people across america it was it was a broadside is a slap in the face for her 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 see 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 height 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 that 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 95 mask and been developed by the United States the world look 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 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 and 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 perth very major surge of the virus infected 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 a 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 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 in 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 trumpet ministration 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. d held for 3 years in an egyptian prison so denied their right to a fair trial no charges have been brought against al jazeera correspondent new saying this crime journalist. To demand my release and voice solidarity with old detained journalists sign the petition. To say. One of americas worst coronavirus outbreaks in a prison happened in california after infected inmates were transferred from one facility to another no ventilation when those are welded shut tell everyone is breathing the same air all of the time every day for a week straight then these alarms its called man down man down man down man down all day all my fault lines asks who is responsible. To make in prison some quentin outbreak on a busy you know dissecting the headlines in the midst of a pandemic lets start with some of the on the ground realities affecting the News Coverage whats the lay of the land challenging assumptions and the official line the listening post on out is the right. Context these are the 3 indepth storytelling around the biggest issues but had to do you should do it again. This is al jazeera. Hello im adrian for get this is that life from joe coming up in the next 60 minutes. Or johnnys b. C. Your desperate seems to a case is made of provinces rescuers continue to search for survivors after the earthquake that killed us