Totally Under Control: Stunning doco investigates how Covid-19 triumphed over America

Totally Under Control (M, 123mins) Directed by Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger *****

You may not even know it yet, but this is surely the documentary Donald Trump doesn’t want you to see.

Done under the radar and completed earlier this month, the day before the 45th president of the United States tweeted that he had tested positive for Covid-19. Fully under control it’s a rage-inducing deep dive that is excoriating about the reasons why America’s response to the pandemic has proven so ineffective.

For Kiwi viewers, it offers a nightmare vision of what could have been and a validation of our own country’s approach (and a relative simplicity of governance).

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Its co-creator is not a partisan swagger like Michael Moore (although his predictions from four years ago haven’t looked at money for the past six months), but rather the sensitive and lucid Alex Gibney, who has previously researched energy company Enron.The smartest guys in the room), the Church of Scientology (Going clear) and disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong (Armstrong’s lie) with a convincing effect. Like his fiction work on shows like Thousands of millions Y The Towe that’s comingr has also shown that he knows how to extract every ounce of drama from a stage.

Not that you really need to turn up the volume in this case. Two hundred and fifteen thousand deaths and 7.8 million cases tell the story. But how Fully under control The same question, how is it that, in a moment of crisis, “the most powerful nation on earth” not only failed to meet the challenge, but descended into deep division and chaos?

Through socially estranged interviews (Gibney and her fellow directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger even created a special Covid camera for the shoot) interviews with front-line medical staff, health officials, White House journalists, and infectious disease experts , as well as key moments from the wall. On the wall news coverage, the documentary builds a timeline, from Wuhan’s first warning in the early days of 2020. The result is an astonishing and impressive tale of how politics got in the way of science and personality triumphed over public health.

While at the end of January, the president may have been right in saying that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) had things “totally under control”; They even had a test ready by the time the first symptomatic person to return from China was found in Washington state. – things quickly unraveled from there. Implementation of the tests across the country stalled after it failed in 90 percent of the labs and it took more than a month to find a solution, at which point community transmission was widespread.

Seemingly focused on riding the wave of relative US economic prosperity from February through November, the administration appeared to lack urgency in dealing with the growing pandemic. When Trump was finally forced to admit that Covid-19 was a threat to the United States, after a (quickly sidelined) health official sounded a warning and scared the stock market, he claimed that “there has never been anything like this before. ”. Someone clearly forgot to inform you about the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected 500 million people around the world (at that time a third of the world’s population).

As Gibney and company point out, it didn’t help that among those leading the response there was a man who had tripled the price of insulin (Alex Azar) and another who had suggested that abstinence was the best way to fight AIDS ( CDC chief Robert Redfield).

While much of what followed has been documented by what the president calls “the fake media,” among the disclosures (to me at least) here is a detail of the ineffectiveness of the EPP search task force for the son-in-law of Trump, Jared Kushner, the repeated offers of help and pleas from a local manufacturer (Mark Bowen) that fell on deaf ears, and the welcoming cartel the administration formed with five American companies to export and distribute by auction to individual states with profit margins seemingly huge. As one commentator observes, that was symptomatic of how this White House seems to function outside of government.

Bringing home America’s relative failures, Fully under control regularly contrasts it with that of South Korea, a country that registered its first case on the same day as the US. Local journalists and health officials detail how their government had learned from perceived failures during the 2015 MERS outbreak there. and they express surprise that the United States has not followed a rigorous policy of testing, tracing and isolation. Their totals to date: just 433 deaths and 24,703 cases, despite the population being at least one-seventh the size of the United States (I leave you to do the math). Other countries get a brief mention, with New Zealand for a few seconds in the form of Highlanders scoring a try in front of a packed crowd.

But if the facts and contradictions don’t catch you, the emotions will. Respondents often cry when they share their frustrations with how things have turned out. Seeing the former director of the Advanced Biomedical Research and Development Authority, Dr. Richard Bright, cry as he remembers how he became a whistleblower, knowing his career would end, is heartbreaking. “The plan was in front of us, but the leadership would not achieve it,” he laments.

There is a point of light between all the sobering and sometimes depressing images and stories: the musical choices. The trio of directors certainly display a wicked sense of humor with their soundtrack cuts, ranging from ironic use of The Rolling Stone Time is on my side to CW McCall’s cult classic Convoy and Paul McCartney’s Live and Let Die (which was certainly on the speaker system when Trump visited a mask factory without wearing one.)

If there are any definitive conclusions from this timely, terrifyingly made, truly terrifying and thought-provoking documentary, it is that, despite a narrative spread by some, public health officials should not be to blame for the death toll of the “household of the brave. ” and economic disaster. Oh, and that great Kiwi philosopher Fred Dagg was right, “we don’t know how lucky we are.”

Fully under control now available to stream on Apple TV.