Subtitles by explosiveskull www.OpenSubtitles.org
2020.
Since the 1980s,
it's been a magical year for science fiction writers,
a year of predictions about the future
and the ruthless power of technology.
Humanity would be bound together by a world wide web,
artificial intelligence would exponentially expand
the powers of the human mind,
and the world would be dominated and controlled
by information-based megacorporations
without need for government intervention.
But all of that turned out to be a technocratic illusion
when nature set loose a terrible disease
that took advantage
of the very connectivity we had manufactured.
In Seattle, the day of reckoning was January 20th,
when America's first patient tested positive for COVID-19.
On that same day in Seoul,
the first case in South Korea would also be confirmed.
Korea moved quickly to contain the disease
and save its economy using a variation
on an American plan.
But in the United States,
politics got in the way of science,
Allowing the virus to spread invisibly and fast.
More than 200,000 people have died.
In the first three months of the pandemic,
30 million people lost their jobs.
No more tyranny. No more tyranny.
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus.
You know that, right?
This is their new hoax.
Who's scared of coronavirus?
- Let go of my fucking cart! - Are you recording me, dawg?
I have the right to buy food without being forced
to participate in a false flag pandemic.
At a moment of crisis,
the world's most powerful nation
didn't rise to the occasion.
It descended into division and chaos.
Back up!
What the fuck is your problem?
Why did the United States
fail to reckon with a danger
for which it should have been so well prepared?
It's one person coming in from China.
It will go away. Just stay calm, it'll go away.
In a couple of days it's gonna be down to close to zero.
We have it totally under control.
It's gonna be just fine.
Breathe in and hold your breath.
Filming during the time of COVID
presented unique challenges.
Okay, and I hold it...
- There's, like, two handles. - Yup.
Wow, you guys have really figured this out, okay.
One work-around was a camera system we invented,
built off-site, and sent to subjects.
We dubbed it "the COVID-cam."
So I was able... can I hear you?
- Hello, yeah! - Hi, it's working!
I'm Scott Becker.
I'm the chief executive officer
of the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
How about this? Now, this is really something.
It's an actual board game.
My wife said,
"You know, we should really get it out and play it."
I'm like, "We're living through it!
I don't need the game!"
One of the functions public health labs have
is looking for those early indications of an outbreak.
And when did you first hear about the coronavirus?
It was January 7th, I believe,
that I first communicated with some of our staff.
They had sent me an email saying, "We're watching this.
"We just talked to CDC and they're gonna
be standing up their emergency operations center."
And I said, "Well, thanks for the update.
"I've been watching this. I'm concerned about it.
And happy new year."
In early 2020,
Trump was indifferent to the looming pandemic.
He was reckoning with simmering conflicts
and the upcoming presidential election.
♪ Time ♪
We begin tonight with the U.S. and Iran on the brink
for the drone strike that killed Qasem Soulemani.
Our economy is booming, wages are rising,
poverty is plummeting, crime is falling,
and America is the envy of the entire world.
♪ That you wanna be free ♪
♪ I won't have to cry no more ♪
The whole impeachment thing is a hoax.
It's a total sham.
♪ Yeah, yeah, time, time ♪
This morning, President Trump signed phase one
of a trade deal between the U.S. and China.
The pact comes after months of escalating tariffs
between the world's two biggest economies.
And we just broke the 29,000 mark on the DOW
just now as we're walking in.
Market's up substantially today.
Up until coronavirus, the way that Donald Trump
was gonna win reelection to a second term
was largely going to be on the strength of the economy.
I covered all of Barack Obama's two terms,
so I was there during the Zika outbreak,
the Ebola response.
As a White House reporter, we sort of cover everything,
so, you know, I've bounced around every topic
that you can possibly imagine in the Trump term
and had just finished covering the president's impeachment
in the House, and the trial in the Senate,
and was thinking that
we might actually get a little bit of a break
on the White House beat, such as it is.
And then a few weeks later, COVID happened.
One of the first indications
that the United States government had that
this was a potential problem was a conversation
that the CDC director, a guy named Robert Redfield,
had with his counterpart, a gentleman
by the name of Dr. Gao, who was essentially the head
of the Chinese CDC, and that occurred on January 3rd.
Chinese health authorities are still working
to identify the virus behind a pneumonia outbreak
in the central city of Wuhan.
Gao basically said, "Look, this is really serious.
"You need to be aware of this.
It's not something we've ever seen before."
I heard about a novel respiratory virus
circulating in China, and my ears perked up.
There you are!
I've been at BARDA for about ten years
in the Department of Health and Human Services.
BARDA's role is to lead the development
between government and industry
of vaccines, drugs, and diagnostic tests.
So I'm very interested, and have been my entire career,
of tracking early blips of novel viruses
that are infecting people.
It's not unusual for us to hear of a new virus emerging
in these wet markets of China.
They can spill over into the human population,
especially the people working in those wet markets.
But then we started seeing China take actions
like build hospitals rapidly, urgently.
All I could get at that point was anecdotal stories
on Twitter, for example.
But anyone who'd worked in preparing
for pandemic outbreaks knew that we were dealing with
something very unusual, very concerning, and very deadly.
You'll get to it. Don't rush.
Here we go. Now you got so exhausted.
So interesting about birds...
we had an earthquake, and they were able to alert us
15 minutes before the earthquake.
Because they are connected to the earth's compass,
so they felt the earth vibrating before it happens.
But you are also a predictor of things before they happen.
Yes, I am obsessed with predicting things,
but that's just part of my mathematical training.
Dr. Lee's training allows her
to act like a canary in a coal mine.
She's world-famous for the way her mathematical modeling
can predict the likely spread of disease
and assess the risk of a pandemic.
I have built so many models
to describe many different type of diseases.
When you see the first case,
it does not mean you only have first case.
It means you have one case plus many other cases
that you don't see.
It's by the time you have 41 cases,
and it is, like, at the end of December,
then that means you have hundreds of others.
So I was really, really nervous at that time.
I absolutely believe there's
human-to-human transmission in China.
If there are travelers coming back to the U.S. or Europe
for celebration of new year, that would be truly a vector
to really transmit the disease all over the world,
so I do feel that we are marching to a pandemic
in the early part of January.
Starting tonight, we're going to begin
screening passengers arriving from Wuhan
at the three airports
that see the majority of those passengers:
JFK, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Nancy Messonnier was in charge
of public messaging for COVID
at the Centers for Disease Control, or CDC.
An experienced public health official
and expert in vaccines,
she had played a leading role in the CDC's response
to the anthrax attacks in 2001.
Just this week...
Our laboratory is using genetic sequences
provided by the Chinese.
We're working on a specific diagnostic test
to detect this virus.
We'll be distributing this test
to state health departments.
This is a respiratory virus.
It is spreading silently, invisibly,
person to person,
in the air, on the surfaces.
Every moment counts to be able to recognize
where the virus is
and to learn as much as we can about it
so we can make life-saving vaccines and drugs
and diagnostic tests.
So did the government have some kind of plan or playbook
that they could look to in the event of something like this?
There's absolutely a playbook.
We've updated playbooks through the various years,
and we actually used those playbooks
to exercise what we would do
in an emerging, viral pandemic
the fall before this virus emerged.
"Crimson Contagion" was
a federal government exercise conducted in 12 states.
It simulated a pandemic with eerie similarities
to the coronavirus that was to come.
It was a very thorough exercise,
highly detailed, with a highly lethal influenza virus
that emerged in Asia
and spread quickly around the world.
We were getting daily "pseudo-reports"
on the outbreak, the death count.
The mistakes made during "Crimson Contagion"
played like a preview of coming attractions
for the failures of the COVID response.
So why did the government fail to learn the lessons needed
to prepare for what was to come?
The challenge has always been who's in charge.
We would have disaster leadership group meetings,
where we would bring together
the Health and Human Services network of experts,
and the ASPR would convene these meetings.
Who was, in fact, the ASPR?
The ASPR was Dr. Bob Kadlec.
The threats our country faces in the 21st century
are very real and very serious.
A 26-year Air Force veteran,
Kadlec was a specialist
in biological and chemical weapons.
As ASPR, he downplayed the danger of pandemics,
cut spending on emerging infectious diseases,
and his office eliminated a program
to manufacture N95 masks.
January 18th, I asked Dr. Kadlec
if we could convene a disaster leadership group meeting.
To my shock, his response was,
"I don't see a sense of urgency."
I just don't think he thought there was a real opportunity
for this virus to come into the United States.
The same day Rick Bright reached out to Kadlec,
Kadlec's boss, Alex Azar,
did try to get the president's attention.
Azar was in charge of the CDC and the FDA
as the secretary of HHS, Health and Human Services.
After the previous secretary had resigned in scandal,
Azar was appointed
to bring a businessman's approach to government.
As a former Big Pharma executive at Eli Lily,
Azar was infamous for having tripled the price of insulin.
I actually knew him in grad school.
Very conservative, very ambitious.
Went on to clerk for Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Within the administration,
Azar was known for his belief that the free market
would meet America's healthcare needs.
We, the government, do not have the solutions
to healthcare.
We're usually the cause of the problems.
With COVID, Azar sensed that the government
might have to play some limited role.
On January 18th, he knew that the president
was leaving town in a couple of days to go to Davos,
and Azar decided, "You know what?
"I think I'd better make sure
the president is aware of this virus."
Trump was actually on the golf course down at Mar-a-Lago
when Azar called.
Azar's pitch to the president
was one, this could be serious,
but also he wanted to convey a sense of kind of,
"We got this."
Of those two messages, the one
that President Trump appears to have really internalized
was the "we got it" message.
The CDC has identified a case of coronavirus
in Washington State.
Have you been briefed by the CDC...
I have.
Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?
No, not at all, and we're...
we have it totally under control.
It's one person coming in from China.
And we have it under control. It's gonna be just fine.
I actually think we were very fortunate
that the first case occurred in the Seattle region.
I sometimes call Seattle sort of the CDC of the West
because there are so many public health researchers
and public health people that end up in Seattle,
so in some ways I felt like, "Okay, they're on top of it,
and we're in good hands."
My name's Alex Greninger,
and I'm the assistant director of the Clinical Virology Lab
here at the University of Washington Medical Center.
Hello.
Everything about that first case from Washington
was just so positive.
I mean, like... let's go through all the positivity there.
You know, someone self-identifies,
says, "Hey, I just flew in from Wuhan and I have a fever."
The sample was sent overnight to the CDC,
where they turned around a test, which is crazy.
They actually had a test for the virus,
where the genome had just gone online 10 days prior.
CDC also sent a team out immediately
upon that confirmation.
They, you know, looked at all of his contacts
and there was no onward transmission.
We never identified another case in
the state of Washington until the last week of February.
But if you recall, he was not tested
until four days after when he became ill.
And he took a share ride back home from the airport,
he had lunch with his colleagues,
and he did a lot of things within four days.
And so I estimate that that is at least in the order
of 2,000 people that has to be tested,
and so we end up missing a lot of the cases.
We're not doctors, but we know a doctor,
and he's actually an expert in viruses.
Dr. Alex Greninger at UDub, you're one of the leading...
I just became an assistant professor,
and so for this new virus, you know, they sort of invited me
to go on the news to talk about it.
I remember later that day, I was in a second interview,
and like, in the middle of the interview,
the interviewer stopped it and said, "Oh,
"they just shut down, like, the city of Wuhan
and there's no more transport in and out of it."
11 million people are under quarantine,
and you're just kind of like, "Wow, that just
doesn't even seem like it's what's gonna happen."
Like, you've just never seen, like, a parallel world
like that, what was gonna happen here too.
How do you look at that more than one month
of not having any other cases in the state of Washington?
Oh, yeah, it was a total lie.
In terms of, like, you know, whether there was actual, like,
you know, whether there were no cases there, right?
I mean "lie" is not the right word,
but just a sort of a... you know, it was a delusion.
The delusion was
that the first COVID patient was the only one.
In fact, the disease was already spreading
inside the United States.
The challenge for scientists was to convince politicians
to mobilize the country
to fight a virus no one could see.
In a meeting on January 23rd,
Rick Bright made his pitch to Alex Azar.
My assignment, remember in BARDA,
is to make sure that we start making
drugs, vaccines, and those tests as quickly as possible.
We were told the CDC was working diligently on a test,
and we were relying solely on the CDC.
I raised the need to get started immediately
on commercial test development drugs and vaccines,
and the need for money to do it.
The secretary looked at me
and said, "You need money?"
And I said, "Yes, we've exercised
that it would take about $10 billion."
Without that experience and knowledge,
I might not have walked into that room
and asked for those things,
but I knew exactly what was needed.
I learned after that meeting, actually,
that a lot of the people were pretty offended
that I would come into a meeting with the Secretary
on day one and ask for money.
And it caused quite a shit storm,
is how it was described to me,
that I ruffled a lot of feathers.
In fact, I wasn't invited back to those meetings
for some time.
In the U.S., political appointees tightened
their purse strings and hoped the virus would just go away.
South Korea reacted very differently.
When it came to this disease response
here in South Korea,
the politicians largely stayed out of the response
and it was left in the hands of professionals.
After confirming its first case of the new coronavirus,
South Korea is stepping up precautionary measures.
- Hello. - Hello.
The first case was a 35-year-old woman
who had entered the country from Wuhan, China.
- Okay? - No.
No?
MERS was a coronavirus
that terrified South Korea,
killing 38 people and sickening hundreds more.
The government was vilified for its response.
Soon after, legislators pursued
a series of critical reforms.
As a result of that, they passed a law
in order to speed up the approval process
of these kits in a time of emergency.
On January 27th,
South Korean health officials summoned representatives
from more than 20 medical companies
to put in place a national testing program.
It was such an urgent request that they just met
in a conference room at one of the train stations in Seoul.
The head of the equivalent of the CDC, he basically said,
"Manufacture me these tests now
and forget about the approval process."
You know, "Start using them, start testing.
"We will come back to make sure it's accurate,
but we'll do that while you're already in the field."
Within a matter of days after that,
the first diagnostic test kit was approved,
and it's a process that typically can take
upwards of a year.
There were four cases at the time,
and it would be another few weeks before there was a death,
but they really felt the need for diagnostic testing
to be able to see where the problem was
and to deal with the threat.
By January 27th,
South Korea was on its way to containing the virus
and preventing an economic shutdown.
Good morning, everyone.
And thank you for joining us here today at HHS.
In the United States,
Azar continued to emphasize the response
that had so pleased President Trump:
"We've got this."
The playbook for responding to an infectious disease
outbreak is relatively simple and multi-tiered.
You identify cases, isolate people,
diagnose them, and treat them.
Then you track down all the contacts
of the infected person, and you do the same with those people,
and the same with contacts of contacts if necessary.
It sounded like a perfect plan,
but it was missing a key detail.
There was no comprehensive national testing
and tracing program.
Even so, the CDC stuck to a version of the script
drafted by Azar.
The CDC will continue
its aggressive public health response strategy,
working to protect the health and safety
of the American public.
Right now, there is no spread of this virus
in our communities here at home.
Appointed by Trump
after his predecessor left in disgrace,
Redfield was a controversial virologist
with no experience leading a public health agency.
During the AIDS crisis, he preached a religious approach,
calling for abstinence as a solution.
With his former assistant, Deborah Birx,
Redfield's attempts to push an unproven HIV vaccine
were twice investigated for scientific misconduct.
Redfield is a little bit of an oddity for the CDC.
The CDC is an institution filled with scientists
and researchers who don't like to be told that science has
to compromise for economics or for politics.
You know, they want to be purists.
Donald Trump is a president who has expressed
an incredible disdain for science
since before he took office.
Inside the West Wing,
they refer to the CDC as the Deep State.
Certainly many of the people at the CDC saw Redfield
as not having the kind of backbone that they would like
to have seen in a CDC director
to stand up to the president
both privately, but also publicly.
Some scientists were willing to push back.
Public health officials from around the country
shared doubts that the CDC was responding to the virus
with enough speed and concern.
They circulated an email chain,
which included Trump officials, called "Red Dawn."
What's going on here, my friend?
It was a tongue-and-cheek nod
to a 1984 movie about a small band of American citizens
who fight back against a Russian invasion.
This is the Emergency Broadcast System.
We are under attack by...
We were a little bit like the Wolverines
from that movie.
They know who all of you are.
They're looking for you.
A group of teenagers that are fighting back,
and one of us thought it would be funny
to use "Red Dawn" as the subject title.
That email chain, it's a group
of former and current state and local officials
within the federal government.
These are all very dear colleagues that have been
in public health and emergency response for a long time.
In late January, we were consciously monitoring,
trying to assess when it hit us,
how big the scope of the calamity
that we are looking into. and how to mitigate it.
I think in January,
the cat was already out of the bag
in terms of we had cases in the U.S.,
we had human-to-human transmission going on
in the U.S.,
and we were going to be dealing with COVID-19.
I mean, I wasn't able to sleep.
I couldn't stop thinking about
what could go wrong for us.
The "Red Dawn" emails would be full
of warnings and recommendations
from experts in pandemic response.
But politicians failed to recognize
that there were lessons to be learned.
There's never been anything like this in history.
There's never been and nobody has ever seen anything
like this.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
To be ready for the perils of the future,
all one had to do is look clearly at the past.
In 1918, in the midst of war,
influenza marched across the earth from country to country.
Epidemic lurked everywhere.
To ward off contagion, special precautions were taken.
With no vaccine and few treatment options,
simple but effective precautionary measures
like masks were all people had.
The H1N1 flu infected 500 million people,
1/3 of the world's population at the time.
The death toll can only be estimated
somewhere between 20 and 50 million people.
Since 1918, scientific advancements
like the invention of the electron microscope
have allowed us to see the "invisible enemy."
But even with vaccines and advances in pathology,
the growth of global transportation
made other pandemics ever more likely.
In 2003, a deadly SARS coronavirus
spread from bats to humans was quickly contained.
In 2009, the Obama Administration
faced a challenge when a new strain of H1N1 emerged.
Good afternoon, everybody.
There's no doubt that every president should learn
from what has happened before.
President Obama felt it very important from the beginning
and all the way through our dealing with H1N1
that the scientists make the calls.
H1N1 influenza is here.
I'm Dr. Tom Frieden.
I directed the CDC from 2009 to 2017.
I just sprayed down the chair with Lysol.
All right.
We dealt with epidemics
of Zika, Ebola, MERS, and H1N1 influenza.
Our Emergency Operations Center was activated
more than 90% of the time that I was there.
That's the way of reducing exposures,
if there is a lot of H1N1.
We do think there may be some challenges, though,
practical challenges.
President Obama made it very clear that HHS was in the lead
and that I would be the spokesperson for the flu,
as he would call me, the face of the flu.
H1N1 was very scary
because children were particularly vulnerable.
Hi, it's Elmo.
And I'm Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Elmo and Secretary Sebelius...
Teaching kids to sneeze into their elbows was a big thing.
First, you learn to sneeze into the bend of your arm like this.
- Achoo. - Oh, very good.
13,000 Americans died from H1N1
and the Obama Administration
mishandled vaccine distribution,
but scientists gave the administration high marks
for moving quickly
and being open with the press and the public.
Just four years later,
the Obama Administration's response to the Ebola crisis
would be criticized for being too slow.
In the case of Ebola I remember being in the room,
in the White House briefing room.
You guys are up here talking about,
"We have this great and perfect system that's going
"to be able to, you know, contain this virus
because we've done all this preparation,"
and yet it doesn't look like it's working.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
I can look back at any outbreak I worked on
and say, "I made a series of mistakes there."
We all do, but the key is,
are they unforced errors?
I think it is important to reflect
on whatever lessons we learn, we build and incorporate.
After the Ebola crisis passed,
the Obama National Security Council had essentially
created a unit within the National Security Council
dedicated to sort of pandemic response.
No, I cannot see Ben.
I can see his hand when he moves it out here,
but he's got a face shield on.
It's pretty good. Hardcore.
Beth Cameron was in charge of countering
biological threats for the Obama Administration.
We set up a new directorate
on global health security and biodefense,
and I was honored to be able to lead that directorate,
and also to be able to take on a lot of the lessons
that we really had learned after the Ebola epidemic.
In 2016,
Beth Cameron and her team at the NSC
drafted a 69-page playbook on how to deal with a pandemic.
The playbook was intended
to allow people in the White House to ask questions.
What should we do?
And also, what do we need to do
to get ahead so that we're not constantly reacting?
So what happened to this playbook?
So the playbook is reported to not have been used.
The Obama Administration did not leave
to this administration any kind of game plan
for something like this.
I have no idea why Mitch McConnell said
that he didn't know about the playbook.
There were a large number of copies
that were spiral bound of this playbook.
It was briefed to the incoming administration.
It did become politicized.
Some have erroneously suggested
that the Trump Administration
threw out the pandemic response playbook
left by the Obama-Biden Administration.
What the critics failed to note, however,
is that this thin packet of paper was replaced
by two detailed, robust, pandemic response reports
commissioned by the Trump Administration.
The last thing that they wanted was to pay attention
to what the Obama people wanted them
to pay attention to.
They were trying to make a clean break
from what they saw as a disastrous presidency,
and this was the Trump presidency.
♪ And I'm proud to be An American ♪
♪ Where at least I know I'm free ♪
I think it's important to understand
that biological threats are not the thing
that is always top of mind for a senior leader.
♪ And I'd gladly stand up ♪
But there really was a lot of pressure
on all of the civil servants
in between Barack Obama and Donald Trump
to explain why we need high-level officials
who are looking at that issue all the time.
After I left, I continued to work with the Trump team
in my new position outside of government
until the directorate was dissolved in May of 2018.
The Global National Security Team was disbanded
under a reorganization
by Trump's National Security Advisor, John Bolton.
It was really shocking that any administration
would get rid of so much experience and expertise
and the collaboration and coordination
that comes with that... those years.
From the moment of Trump's inauguration,
the guiding slogan of staffing was not "you're hired,"
but "you're fired."
Key positions went unfilled.
Many more were eliminated.
And when people were hired,
experience was not nearly as important as loyalty.
On January 29th, the White House announced the formation
of an official task force
to confront the threat of the coronavirus.
Well, good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Alex Azar.
Led by Azar,
the task force had little scientific expertise.
Most were businessmen and lawyers, seemingly chosen
for their political or religious beliefs.
One had been Sarah Palin's foreign policy advisor.
Another was a climate change denier
who opposed homosexuality as an act against nature.
The only two public health officials
were Redfield and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
At the National Institute of Health,
Fauci had advised six presidents
and had been at the forefront of every epidemic response
for the last 40 years.
The issue now with this is that there's a lot of unknowns.
As you can see just from the media,
the number of cases have steeply inclined
each and every day.
At the first briefing,
they announced no concrete programs
to contain the virus
inside the borders of the United States.
Instead, they offered a variation
of a familiar Trump refrain... "build a wall."
Foreign nationals, other than immediate family
of U.S. citizens and permanent residents
who have traveled in China within the last 14 days
will be denied entry into the United States for this time.
In the months after that, tens of thousands of people
from China still make their way into the United States,
mostly Americans who are returning home
and are not blocked by that ruling.
"Diamond Princess," this is your captain speaking
from the bridge.
We have been notified that
10 additional people
have tested positive for coronavirus.
The captain of the "Diamond Princess"
had docked his vessel in Yokohama
after learning a passenger had tested positive for COVID-19.
The Japanese government ordered a 14-day quarantine.
Eventually, over 700 passengers
would test positive.
That made the "Diamond Princess"
the largest known outbreak of the virus outside of China.
Donald Trump, save us.
Get us a government-based airplane.
- Not even that, just like... - Get us off the ship.
I received a phone call
that a disaster medical assistance team
was being assembled to do a rescue operation
to go pull American citizens off of the "Diamond Princess"
and bring them back to the U.S.
And I was asked if I would be willing to go
as an expert to go help the team.
Okay, they've got a bunch of people in white coats.
They're not white coats. They're white hazmat suits.
They've got these little tunnels down here.
The E.T. Tunnels, I call them.
At the time, we still didn't know a lot
about the transmission dynamics
or even the severity and lethality of the disease.
The "Diamond Princess" confirmed
many, many of what I was nervous about.
First of all, it shows
how it spread in a confined environment
with lots of people, right?
Even though all of them has their own cubicle,
but that's exactly like apartment complexes
in New York City, and you go out, right?
You go to places confined in a mall, and in classrooms,
in dormitories, in many, many settings.
It basically gave us a very parallel world
of what could be happening to us.
Even after the ship went into quarantine
and passengers were really restricted to their rooms,
the fact that the outbreak continued to grow demonstrated
that there may be more to transmission phenomenon
than we initially thought.
So when we saw that, that really hit home to us
that this is a pretty explosive situation.
Okay, they quarantine, but yet the spread is like fire.
It shows... it really highlights strategic tests is a must.
Eva Lee began to sound the alarm
in the "Red Dawn" emails about asymptomatic spread
and the need to test widely.
She knew in early February
what federal officials refused to recognize.
Only a vast infrastructure for mass testing
could spot and contain a virus
that was already moving invisibly across the country.
Then I thought to myself, "That is it."
We will have no chance to contain.
If we are not going to take actions now,
we would regret and we would be late, late, late.
The trifecta is test, trace, and isolate.
You need to have all three of those working in tandem
to be able to take down any infectious disease.
I'm from Hong Kong,
and I grew up during SARS,
so I guess that was my first experience with an outbreak,
which has turned out to be an interesting reference point
during this outbreak.
My boss was like, "You should cover the coronavirus."
So my question's gonna be,
where are we deviating from the playbook?
That's where I hold the government accountable.
So the CDC made a test that worked in their lab
before the first case of COVID
landed in the state of Washington on January 20.
What they saw as their next step was sending test kits
based on their design
to public labs around the country.
So CDC can't just make a test and send it out.
They have to apply for Emergency Use Authorization.
This week, the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization
for the CDC's diagnostic test.
Having a declaration of an emergency
allows you to, like, cut through a lot of red tape
where, like, you don't have to
approve things the traditional pathway,
which takes many, many years.
So it's like going through the precheck line at the airport.
FDA issued the EUA to CDC really on February 4th,
and test kits were available on the 5th.
The test kits will start shipping
to the over 100 U.S. public health labs.
Each test kit can perform up to 800 patient samples.
It works in about four to five hours' time.
And that's pretty heroic, in two weeks,
to develop test kits for the country.
So, so far, speaking of the playbook,
everything was going right.
The first thing public health labs have to do
after they get the test is they have to verify
that the test works in their hands,
in their laboratory, with their scientists.
So on Saturday, February 8th,
labs opened up their boxes
and they started to get the test up and running.
And then, the next morning,
I see a number of emails
from public health laboratory directors saying,
"We're seeing this problem with one of the components
"of the test, the N3,
and is anyone else seeing that?"
Then my phone started to blow up.
It became apparent that we actually had a real problem.
And I thought to myself,
"Oh, my God.
This is a nightmare."
There were many labs that were having the same problem.
So that was an indication
that this was coming from the CDC labs.
There are three components to the CDC-designed tests.
They are called the N1, N2, and N3 assay,
and the N1 and N2 assay, together,
look specifically for the COVID-19 coronavirus.
And then they had a 3rd component, the N3 assay,
which was designed to look for any coronavirus.
And I don't know why they decided
to throw that third part in.
They didn't need it, but that third part
is the part that caused all the problems.
It was a contamination problem.
This was just a huge lightbulb moment
where... wow, we could really be on pause.
The CDC says they're working with states now
to fix the tests.
They did not say how many of the kits have flaws.
Now, this was really frustrating
to a lot of lab directors because they were like,
"Look, the N1 and N2 part of this test are working
"totally fine,
"so why don't we just ignore the part
that isn't working?"
Under an Emergency Use Authorization,
you're not supposed to do that.
You have to run that test exactly as it's assigned.
As it turned out,
over 90% of public health labs
had tests that were not working.
So it was really as if we were flying blind,
and we knew it, and frankly,
there was nothing we could do except wait.
There was a working effective test
that was created in a German laboratory
that was being distributed by the World Health Organization
to countries all around the world.
It is available now
and we are shipping an essential component to labs
to really start working immediately.
The WHO test quite frankly is used
for low and moderately income countries.
I think it would've been very unusual
to use another country's test, and not for political reasons.
Just, I guess, because of maybe scientific hubris.
We've never had a failure like this.
Despite the technical problems at the CDC,
the Trump Administration could have insisted
on an alternate plan.
Public labs could have pivoted to the WHO test
or removed the N3 element.
Test manufacturers and clinical labs
were eager to start making their own tests,
but for reasons that remain unexplained,
the FDA put the brakes on the approval process.
Yeah.
Looks like the setup is pretty good.
Oh, good, doctor approved?
Yup, exactly.
My name is Taison Bell.
I'm an infectious disease and critical care physician
at the University of Virginia.
I'm the director of the COVID ICU.
It's really important to know
who's positive in the community
and to be able to test in a widespread, aggressive fashion
so we can really stop the chain of transmission
of the virus.
Traditionally, there's a lot of leeway
when it comes to federal regulations
and hospital laboratories' ability
to set up their in-house testing,
but the thing about the emergency declaration
was that it made the diagnostic innovation
more difficult because now it had to go through the FDA.
So now, all of a sudden,
any university laboratory that has the experience
and the know-how to set up their own in-house testing
now has to clear it in order to make this work.
We're not a public health lab.
As a clinical lab, we're not part of this system.
You know, the CDC and the state public health labs
are fantastic,
but clinical labs,
like hospital clinical labs, commercial labs,
perform 90% to 95% of testing.
We really are the front lines of the public health system,
and so it's really important
that we're a part of that conversation as well.
So we're trying to figure out, is it better
to just deal with the FDA and the backlog there
and set up our own in-house testing,
or do we just wait for the CDC
to fix the issues with the test?
We decided initially to wait,
and that was the wrong decision.
Many labs gave up
rather than face the thicket of bureaucratic rules.
But Alex Greninger did not give up,
and instead began
to slog through the FDA regulatory process.
So at that point, you had to really go fully in.
You gotta make your own test.
So we got the template and the paperwork.
You couldn't get the comments back
until you mail in the document.
Even though you'd email a document,
you had to burn it to a CD or a USB
and physically send the document as well.
The original process suggested
testing 50 positive samples,
but in that case in the U.S., there were 14 known cases.
But even getting that one sample,
that one positive sample, was the hardest part.
And obtaining clinical material from the CDC
is very difficult.
And I think that was when you realize
that the FDA and the CDC maybe hadn't talked a ton.
Swing your partner around and 'round.
And around. And around.
While federal agencies failed
to talk to each other, the virus swirled in mid-February
through a series of square dances in suburban Seattle.
With every do-si-do, the virus changed partners.
But without testing,
scientists couldn't follow the spread.
The emergency steps meant for speed and innovation
slowed the process down to a crawl.
The White House could have cut through the red tape.
The mystery is why those in power
didn't force the bureaucracy to find a quick solution.
While we were on pause,
the anxiety level of our members just increased
exponentially, day after day.
There was just more frustration, concern,
frankly sadness, because we weren't
able to do our job.
That was really tough.
While testing in the U.S. was stalled,
in South Korea, the government was already moving
to contain the virus by utilizing
a comprehensive national testing and tracing program.
I think they did a much better job.
I think starting from the testing roll-out,
a lot of our jealousy early on
was just how rapidly they were able
to test a large proportion of their population.
And they were testing
relatively younger asymptomatic people
as well as older people who had more severe diseases,
and they were able to do contact tracing.
Because of the laws that were passed in 2016,
enabling contact tracers to obtain vast amounts
of information in the name of disease control,
there was a large amount of data
that authorities here can access.
Cell tower information,
CCTV footage, credit card data.
And this information was pushed out
to the general public using cell phone alerts.
♪ To glance behind ♪
♪ The Phantom of the Opera ♪
♪ Is here ♪
If two people singing
could spread the disease,
imagine thousands singing in one room.
A major outbreak was traced to the Shincheonji Church,
a doomsday Christian cult.
Led by a self-proclaimed messiah, Chairman Lee.
- Hallelujah. - "Hallelujah."
The Korean government descended
on the city of Daegu,
where the church had its primary place of worship.
By testing, tracing, and isolating
the followers of Chairman Lee,
officials tried to prevent the virus
from spreading to the rest of the city.
Thousands of additional people had been exposed.
It led to South Korea's numbers soaring.
Because South Korea had already started ramping up
diagnostic test production, they were able to seek out
every member of this church in Daegu
and get them tested.
The President of South Korea has put the country
on the highest possible alert after the number of cases
jumped to more than 760 and the death toll rose to 7.
Because of the surge of cases in Daegu,
South Korea started opening up these centers.
Drive-through testing
and special testing booths protected healthcare workers
while dramatically increasing testing capacity.
And manufacturers were able to keep up with the volume.
South Korea also stepped up production of PPE
to protect health workers and the public alike.
Early adoption of testing would save South Korea.
At the same moment in the United States,
testing was still halted, and the nation was blind
to where and how the virus was spreading.
Because of all we've done,
the risk to the American people remains very low.
When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days
is going to be down to close to zero, we're doing great.
Other countries have not been doing great.
Our consumer is very, very strong,
very powerful economically.
Underneath the booming economic wave
was an invisible undertow of disease.
By mid-February, pandemic models indicate
that there were thousands of cases spreading
through Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York.
By mid to late February, the sort of top experts...
Robert Redfield, Nancy Messonnier,
Anthony Fauci, Azar...
they decide, "We gotta tell the president
"that we have to become more aggressive
"about warning the American public
that this is where we're headed."
The problem was the president just that next day
left for another foreign trip to India.
Well, I look forward to being with the people of India.
We're gonna have many millions and millions of people.
They wanted to brief the president obviously
before you sort of made this sort of...
right turn on messaging.
Yeah, we're very much involved.
We're very...
very cognizant of everything going on.
We have it very much under control.
Thank you very much, everybody.
And the doctors knew that this wasn't the kind of thing
that you brief over the telephone,
so they decided, "We'll set up a briefing
for the president the day he gets back."
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi
rolled out the red carpet for President Trump.
Namaste. Namaste.
President Trump often judges events based on their size.
The bigger the better, so it's fitting
that this stadium was absolutely packed
with more than 100,000 people.
The rally kicked off a whirlwind trip
packed with the pageantry that the president so loves.
As of this morning, we still have only 14 cases
of the China coronavirus
detected here in the United States.
We have three cases
among Americans repatriated from Wuhan,
and we have 40 cases among American passengers
repatriated from the "Diamond Princess" in Japan.
We're trying to engage in radical transparency
with the American public as we go through this.
This morning, Dr. Messonnier from the CDC
provided the usual tele-briefing.
There was a bit of confusion,
and it was Nancy Messonnier's understanding
that the green light had been given
for that new message
to be delivered before briefing the president.
So at her next conference call for reporters,
she went to town.
I remember being shocked,
thinking, "Does she realize what she just said?"
I can't say that I know
what was in Nancy Messonnier's mind,
but it wouldn't be hard to guess
that there must have been a level of frustration
built up inside the CDC
about a president who doesn't take this seriously.
I mean, you know, that was palpable.
Statements were made for the first time
to prepare the psyche of Americans
for what we, the scientists, knew was coming.
It was a turning point in this outbreak
because the truth was finally broken through that shell
of so many people standing there every day
telling Americans, "We have it under control.
"We have it contained. It's not a problem.
It's going away."
Those were the messages every day up until that point.
She gives that briefing at virtually the exact moment
that Trump is walking up the steps
on "Air Force One" in India.
On a larger scale, communities and cities
may need to modify, postpone, or cancel mass gatherings.
Nancy Messonnier's comments tank the market.
1,000 point drop in the DOW.
Stocks fall sharply as fears spread
that growing coronavirus will slow the global economy.
It was essentially a kind of freak out.
The stock market taking another beating
after a sharp new warning from the CDC.
Also, tonight...
Trump doesn't like to be surprised.
The one gleaming, wonderful thing
that was giving him and his advisors hope was the economy.
It was the silver bullet.
That was how he was going to win a second term.
That, combined with Messonnier's threat
of what she was suggesting... shut the country down...
"You're saying something
"that's gonna threaten the economy,
and by definition, threaten my reelection."
It's an 18-hour flight back.
By the time Trump lands,
the whole thing had spun out of control, and he was livid.
He calls up Alex Azar, wakes him up,
screaming at him... what had happened?
"Do you know Nancy Messonnier
had scared the shit out of people?"
The CDC said yesterday that they believe it's inevitable
that the virus will spread in the United States,
and it's not a question of if, but when.
Do you agree with that assessment?
Whatever happens, we're totally prepared.
We have the best people in the world.
Notably missing
from "the best people in the world"
was Dr. Nancy Messonnier.
It didn't surprise me that the moment she said that,
that she would be removed from that platform.
I'm going to be announcing exactly right now
that I'm gonna be putting our Vice President, Mike Pence,
in charge.
I'm gonna ask Mike Pence to say a few words, please.
Thank you. Mike?
After the episode with Nancy Messonnier,
when Pence's team takes over from Azar,
essentially the message gets contained.
Not in the least.
I was delighted that I get to have the Vice President helping
in this way.
Delighted. Absolutely.
Now at the helm of the task force,
Pence promptly promoted Deborah Birx,
a doctor and a diplomat, to be a spokesperson.
Dr. Birx, who is our right arm at the White House on this,
and frankly, one of the leading experts in the world
on infectious disease, I think is...
Pence trusted Birx
on account of her Christian faith and political instincts.
She'd become a go-to-explainer for a White House interested
in packaging science to serve partisan goals.
We really want to understand
where the virus is spreading, who we have to protect,
who's the most vulnerable.
That would have been easy to understand
if there had been a national testing program,
but that was still stalled.
While countries all over the world
were testing thousands of cases,
the United States was testing fewer than 100 a day.
At that stage, the only labs across the country
that could legally test for COVID
were a few public health laboratories
and the CDC itself.
The frustration was just boiling over,
and I remember going to these meetings
with our clinical lab director,
and she'sliterally on the phone with the FDA and the CDC
like, "You need to help us! You need to help us."
After almost a month
of labs across the country being unable to test,
the Trump Administration finally made a decision
it could have made weeks earlier.
On February 26th,
the FDA and the CDC laid out the strategy,
and that was that we would be able to get up and running
by using the original test kit,
but by throwing out the N3 component.
Overnight with, you know,
with some crossing out of lines on some paper,
the same test kits that had been shipped out
to the state public health labs were functional.
That amended EUA was Wednesday, February 26th,
and you can watch the testing curve in the United States.
I mean it really didn't start going up
until that week.
Here in Washington State at the state lab,
they had positive results the very first time
they performed authorized tests.
After desperate pleas
from health care providers,
the FDA also relaxed regulations and
let manufacturers and hospital labs use their own tests.
But it was too little, too late.
The disease had spread to half the states in the country.
And test kits were in such short supply
that they were limited to patients
who met rigid guidelines set by the CDC.
Early on, our testing was limited to people
who had traveled from China, or they had had contact
with someone who was known tested positive for COVID-19.
So written in our guidelines,
by necessity because we had a strained testing supply,
it was designed to miss community transmission,
meaning transmission that happens
throughout the community that's not connected to travel,
that we know at some point's gonna happen.
And it's like we're looking in this area,
and we know that transmission's gonna happen
over here, and we're gonna miss it
because we can't test for it.
On February 27th,
the new testing recommendations came out.
Do you mind removing the mask?
- Is that okay? - Oh, no, not at all.
Didn't know what your rules of engagement were there, so...
The new addition was this line that said,
"If you have severe lower respiratory pneumonia,
"severe pneumonia or ARDS...
"Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome...
you should consider testing."
With the updated guidelines,
we initiated testing in two individuals,
and both of those individuals tested positive.
So that evening after we got the first two back,
we looked around the intensive care unit and said,
"Okay, who else is sick with pneumonia
"that has not been diagnosed with influenza
or another respiratory virus?"
And we selected nine more individuals.
Eight of those turned out to be positive for COVID.
It was an astounding revelation.
The revelation was that while testing protocols
were on hold, the disease had spread uncontrollably,
which would lead to economic disaster
and loss of tens of thousands of lives.
The real question is, did more people die?
Did more dislocation and economic problems
and societal change have to happen than did?
The period that in our reporting
that we have called "The Lost Month,"
that really was the time
when things happened in the United States
much more slowly than they happened in,
for example, South Korea,
and it became impossible to do containment.
Because the U.S. failed to contain the virus,
state governments moved to lockdowns
to avoid runaway contagion
and to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed.
Over 100,000 small businesses would close and never reopen.
7 million Americans would be infected by the disease.
But back in late February, the government refused
to confront the reckoning that was about to come.
We have done an incredible job.
We're going to continue.
It's going to disappear one day.
It's like a miracle. It will disappear.
The president is also quoted by saying,
"The virus we're talking about having to do,
"you know, a lot of people think it goes away in April
with the heat."
Dr. Fauci, does this go away in April?
If it acts like influenza,
the heat will actually make it diminish in its impact,
but we have no way of knowing how it's gonna act.
Does the CDC agree that this is a problem
that is going to go away without intervention?
I think it's prudent to assume
that this pathogen will be with us for some time to come.
The President's expressing confidence this team,
the public health infrastructure in this country,
state and local, that we can deal with this.
We will prepare for this. We will work together on this.
He's trying to calm a public that...
we see in China, panic can be as big of an enemy as virus
in these situations,
and so there is always that balance to...
Mr. Secretary, I don't want to panic over this either.
The stock market's crashing.
He's outright contradicting
everything that you all have just said.
Outright contradiction!
I think he's expressing confidence in...
With no medical basis for it!
That's what you've just explained to us.
Come on, sir.
The gentleman's time has expired.
You're doing a great job for the president, Mr. Secretary.
Now the Democrats are
politicizing the coronavirus.
You know that right? Coronavirus.
One of my people came up to me and said,
"Mr. President, they tried to beat you
"on Russia, Russia, Russia.
They tried the impeachment hoax."
And this is their new hoax.
And so far,
we have lost nobody to coronavirus
in the United States.
Nobody.
The next day, that would change.
Today, Public Health... Seattle and King County... is announcing
three new presumptive positive cases of novel coronavirus,
COVID-19, including one person who died.
We have expressed our condolences to the families
of the individual who has passed away.
It was one of the first two patients diagnosed,
it was my patient, and all we saw was a future
of extremely ill individuals like this.
So it was a challenging moment,
a daunting moment, to come to that realization.
Today, health officials in Washington State
announced four new deaths, bringing the total to six,
all in the Seattle area.
By early March, King County, Washington
had become the epicenter of the coronavirus in the U.S.
due to the Lifecare Nursing Home.
They're not answering the phones, the lines are busy.
All the families are really worried,
not knowing if our loved ones are even alive.
It was a blur of activity.
We realized that our hospital
was now the tip of the iceberg.
We soon found out how deep that iceberg went.
Because test kits were in short supply,
access was limited to patients
who were dangerously close to respiratory failure.
The death count began to rise.
COVID began spreading
to health care workers and first responders.
The job situation put them at increased risk.
Nurses' aides in nursing homes
without the protective equipment or training
they needed to be safe and secure.
Individuals who have jobs
that were considered essential jobs,
they're stocking grocery shelves
and helping to pick up trash in communities
and sweep the streets.
While many affluent Americans
worked on computers at home,
low-paid essential workers,
many without masks and the ability to distance,
were jammed into sites of contagion
like delivery depots, industrial farms, factories,
funeral homes, and meatpacking plants.
If the impact of the disease was divided by occupation,
it was also sundered by age and race.
My grandmother used to say,
"You know, when the country gets the flu,
black people get pneumonia."
It's well-known in our circles that we have worse outcomes
when it comes to a lot of these different diseases,
you know, and part of that is systemic racism.
A lot of it is access to healthcare.
If you have the money, you can get the best healthcare
in the world, but without those resources,
you have inadequate care and sporadic care.
So any kind of disease spread then falls hardest
on communities that are already at a health risk.
What are we dealing with?
With this coronavirus, COVID-19?
We're dealing with clearly an emerging infectious disease
that has now reached outbreak proportions
and likely pandemic proportions.
The "Grand Princess" Cruise Ship has been moored
off the coast of California.
I want to commend the efforts of our Coast Guard
that heroically flew coronavirus tests
to the ship.
21 tested positive for the coronavirus.
On his way to a weekend trip
to Mar-a-Lago, Trump made a stop at the CDC.
Watching the president go
to the Centers for Disease Control,
he discussed with a reporter
the fact that one of the cruise ships was still offshore.
I'd rather have them stay on
because I like the numbers being where they are.
I don't need to have the numbers double
because of one ship.
For the first time, it occurred to me
that the government of the United States
was intentionally slow walking testing.
In this big vast land of ours,
this great country of ours, we have 240 cases.
Most of those people are gonna be fine.
The vast majority are going to be fine.
We've had 11 deaths.
All of our state labs
now have the ability to test for this virus...
And they have had.
The testing has been amazing, actually,
what they've been able to produce
in such a short period of time.
Anybody that wants a test can get a test.
Anybody who wanted a test knew that was a lie.
Just finding a facility was hard.
People with the disease were denied tests
on account of supply backlogs,
which also caused delays in results.
The next day, while Trump golfed,
Pence and Redfield went to Cruise Lines of America.
We all recognize the recent challenges
on the "Diamond Princess,"
and the ongoing challenge with the "Grand Princess,"
and we want to ensure that the American people
can continue as we deal with the coronavirus
to enjoy the opportunities in the cruise line industry
and be confident.
I would not encourage anyone
to change their plans at this point
based on what the epidemiology is here in Florida.
They should enjoy Disneyland.
They should enjoy the rest of Florida.
There is this back and forth,
the medical folks saying we need to take this seriously,
we need to be aggressive,
the economic folks pushing back and saying, "Yeah, but..."
Fauci would march up and answer questions.
Do you believe that people,
even if they're healthy, should get onboard a cruise ship?
I would recommend strongly
that they do not go on a cruise ship.
And then Trump or Pence would come back
and sort of contradict him.
We're gonna work with the cruise line industry
to improve the safety,
improve the health environment on cruise lines.
Frankly, the testing has been going very smooth.
If you go to the right agency,
if you go to the right area, you get the test.
Will you admit that there is a serious problem
in this country
obtaining access to testing for coronavirus?
My colleague is looking at me to answer that.
- Here we go. - Okay.
The system is not really geared
to what we need right now.
- That is a failing. - A failing, yes.
It is a failing. Let's admit it.
Dr. Fauci said earlier this week
that the lag in testing was, in fact, a failing.
Do you take responsibility for that?
Yeah, no, I don't take responsibility at all.
We're doing a great job.
Yeah, we have 40 people right now... 40.
Compare that with other countries
that have many, many times that amount.
To keep new cases from entering our shores,
we will be suspending all travel from Europe
to the United States for the next 30 days.
There was a problem
with Trump's sudden travel ban...
it had no plan attached.
If we do get back to the U.S., then what happens?
Do we go into quarantine? Do we go home?
Returning Americans flooded U.S. airports,
where they were jammed in makeshift COVID checkpoints.
They were perfect conditions for more contagion,
as travelers from Europe spread the virus into the U.S.
The message to New Yorkers from the beginning has been,
"This is something we all can handle together.
Go about your lives. Go about your business."
The Governor confirming
that coronavirus has arrived here in Manhattan.
The coronavirus spreads tonight as Governor Cuomo
announces five more positive cases in New York.
The number of confirmed cases has reached 121.
Today, Governor Cuomo announcing a ban
on any gatherings of 500 people or more.
And 613 confirmed cases of coronavirus in New York.
That is more than any other state.
I'm glad to see that you're practicing social distancing.
That looks very nice.
We're announcing new guidelines for every American to follow.
Avoid gathering in groups of more than 10 people,
and avoid eating and drinking in bars, restaurants.
And if everybody in America does what we ask for,
we will see a dramatic difference,
and we won't have to worry about the ventilators,
and we won't have to worry about the ICU beds.
Our volume is just exploding.
We have so many people in the hallways.
A day or so ago, we put 14 people on ventilators.
Mayor de Blasio says that there have been 100 new cases
in the city today alone.
So we're going to put out an executive order today.
New York State on pause.
19 million New Yorkers are being asked to stay at home
as much as possible.
Now topping 85,000 confirmed cases
and more than 1,400 deaths.
I hate to say this, but it's true...
we are now the epicenter of this crisis
right here in the nation's largest city.
And if this goes on for a month, or two, or three,
or five like it did in China, we don't have what we need.
This is not a country that was built to be shut down.
We're not gonna let the cure be worse than the problem.
Worried about the economy,
Trump tried to limit shutdowns,
but the virus was out of control.
By April, over 3,000 New Yorkers had died,
surpassing the death toll of 9/11.
ICUs were over capacity with patients who couldn't breathe.
Ventilators were in short supply,
and many of those who got them did not survive.
We had seen the pandemic
was really taking off in New York City.
We were in a central area of Virginia
where there's not a huge population,
and it was like being on a coastal city
and you hear about an earthquake
that happens offshore.
You know that a tsunami is coming.
You just don't know when it's gonna happen
and how severe it's gonna be.
A U.S. Marine in Virginia
has tested positive for the coronavirus.
This is the first positive case in Virginia,
and here's what we know.
I remember one day, I was rounding in our COVID ICU,
and our unit is structured kind of like a V,
so there's one wing here, another wing over there.
And you know, these are some of the sickest patients
I've ever taken care of in my life.
They're on breathing machines, dialysis machines.
They are needing lots of medicines
to keep them sedated and calm.
And I'm trying to get through morning rounds,
and I see that on one wing,
it's almost all Hispanic last names.
And then, on the other wing,
it's almost all Black names.
I grew up an hour away from where I'm working.
These are the family names that I grew up with,
and I know these families.
And I just was trying to focus on the medical part
and just getting through it,
but I just felt this weight on my chest.
I'm a Black male in the United States
and my family members have chronic diseases
at high rates,
and I've been dealing with this my whole life.
And now I have family members who are contracting COVID.
Those are smiles and hugs and tears and barbeques.
They're not numbers on a paper.
Through the spring,
the death toll would rise to 100,000.
It was a terrifying marker
for the failure of the American response.
The U.S. was 4% of the world's population
and 20% of the deaths from the virus.
Despite the fatal consequences of inaction,
the government could not solve basic problems
like supplies for test kits.
In March, we started to see the global supply chain
really get jammed up.
So it was extraction kits, swabs.
The major producer of swabs
is in the Lombardy region of Italy.
And Italy had just gone on lockdown,
and the swabs company was in a no-fly zone,
so the U.S. supply is basically going...
grinding to a halt.
Every single step of the way, we've encountered an issue
or a problem with the supply chain.
Potential supply chain problems
had been identified in "Crimson Contagion."
The focus was on testing supplies and lifesaving PPE.
The most critical items needed were N95 masks,
whose firm fit and tight mesh offered healthcare workers
real protection from the disease.
We had estimated the number of N95 respirators
that would be needed.
That number was 3 1/2 billion.
And we had a fraction
of what we would need in the stockpile.
And all of those had a five-year shelf life,
and a lot of those,
they were purchased almost ten years ago.
Despite Ebola, despite Zika, despite H1N1,
filling up the national stockpile for some virus
that we don't even know is ever gonna come
has never been the top priority.
You can say the Obama Administration didn't do enough
to leave the next administration prepared.
You can also say, "Well, that's true,
but the Trump Administration had three and a half years."
The Strategic National Stockpile was not intended
to be everything that we would need for an entire crisis.
I think in mid-January, the U.S. government
should have been looking at the stockpile
to see what was in it
and how we were gonna pivot to manufacture more.
We should have been having the conversation
about the Defense Production Act in January.
There's talk of invoking war powers
to require U.S. companies to manufacture some goods.
That's right,
so that's called the Defense Production Act.
I believe it came into existence
during the Korean War.
Effectively, we can determine
that our production should get to the front of the line.
We'll use it if we need to, but we obviously...
if we can work cooperatively with any vendor,
we'd rather do that.
"Let the market work its magic."
That was the guiding philosophy for Azar and Trump,
but their anti-government strategy
ignored basic rules of supply and demand.
Without a large order from the United States government,
there really wasn't an incentive for these companies
to start maximizing their throughput.
I was getting reports from Mike Bowen, one of the few
remaining producers of face masks and respirators
in the United States
who had his finger on the pulse of the supply chain.
I'm a salesman telling a story that nobody believes.
The story is that the U.S. mask supply is gonna collapse
and people are gonna die.
It doesn't cost much to fix.
That's the story.
Around 2005, all of the major mask makers left the country.
It put the U.S. mask supply
in the hands of foreign control
and could be subject to diversion during a pandemic.
And that's what I've been warning about for years.
I wrote Barack Obama 20 letters.
"Tell America's hospitals that they are going to be
"in a position to not be able to protect their staff
and their patients."
I voted for Donald Trump.
I thought, "You know, if I contact enough people
"in the administration, somebody, one of these people
"are gonna look at this and go, 'Hey, this is a problem.
Maybe we ought to call this guy.'"
And no, I couldn't get any...
I didn't get any response there.
In January, Bowen's predictions came true.
As China struggled to contain the outbreak of COVID,
it limited the export of N95 masks to the United States.
At the end of January,
I'm hearing from all over the world.
People are freaking out about masks, and needing masks.
And that's when I got ahold of Rick and said,
"Hey, here's what I'm seeing out here.
This is gonna be bad."
He was sounding the alarm bells almost every day.
We can't protect America's population.
That's too late, but I said I can at least make
enough masks to protect America's healthcare workers.
I reminded him that we had these four respirator lines.
To activate them we would need more people, raw materials,
emergency NIOSH approval, and large non-cancellable orders.
I see that our country's gonna have a problem,
I get ahold of Rick.
I pushed every one of those emails
up to the Strategic National Stockpile
and Critical Infrastructure Team.
I reminded them of the H5N1 scare,
when people rushed to buy masks and hoard masks.
The response I got was,
"We will just change the CDC guideline.
And we'll just tell people, don't do that."
Basically in March, they realized
that the healthcare workers
are not going to have enough PPE,
so they basically issued a warning to the public,
"Do not use face masks."
Do you have any sense of how many more N95 masks
would be on the market had the federal government taken you up
on your offer to reactivate N95 manufacturing lines
in January?
About 7 million N95 respirators per month.
I sounded the alarm every day
about the shortage of N95 respirators,
and we were doing nothing.
The numbers continue to surge in hotspots
like California, Michigan, Louisiana, Florida,
and especially, of course, New York.
Medical resources are stretched to capacity
and beyond.
We had saved some outdated N95 masks
that were part of the Ebola response,
but quickly we ran out of those supplies,
so we had to make do.
Some of the N95 masks that we received
had been in storage for years and years,
and while the actual mask itself worked fine,
the rubber band was brittle.
So there were people in the room
taking care of a patient, and the mask just snaps off.
The CDC is now advising healthcare workers
to ration masks, to use expired masks,
even use bandanas or scarves as a last resort.
Our usage increased by several hundredfold.
We could see our equipment supply going down dramatically.
So you kind of clamp down a little bit and say, you know,
"We're gonna save it for these very specific encounters."
So now, from the perspective of a healthcare worker,
you're taking away my safety.
And what people really wanted was a big enough supply
so that anyone who felt that they were at a higher risk
could be safe.
One mask to be worn for 12 hours.
It's just ridiculous.
No protective equipment, the gowns.
We have to improvise with what we have.
We have people coming in sewing masks, sewing shields,
making things out of plastics.
This is what we're doing now?
I mean that would be like a soldier going to war
and making a plastic gun to bring with him.
This is what's happening.
- PPEs! - Every day!
PPEs!
Every day!
We're here in the community fighting every day,
and we need some help.
In February, the Trump Administration actually
created the China-COVID Procurement Service
to encourage American producers like 3M
to sell their entire inventories of N95 masks
to China.
When American hospitals desperately needed N95s,
they were forced to import them
and pay up to 10 times more
than the price charged by American producers.
PPE has been sporadic, but we do what we have to do.
We're nurses, and we learn to adapt
and to get the job done and get the care provided,
and that's what we're gonna continue to do.
Sporadic for you,
but not sporadic for a lot of other people.
Oh, no, I agree, Mr. President.
Because I've heard the opposite.
I've heard that they are loaded up with gowns now.
And you know, initially, we had nothing.
We had empty cupboards. We had empty shelves.
We had nothing because it wasn't put there
by the last administration.
In the midst of the crisis,
President Trump goes on TV and says, "Don't worry.
We've got plenty of PPE for healthcare workers."
What was your reaction when you saw that?
I know what my reaction was.
I turned to my wife and said, "That's complete bullshit.
He has no idea what he's talking about."
I'm getting 500 to 1,000 emails a day.
I'm getting emails from people, not businesses.
I'm getting emails from moms.
I'm getting emails from old people, "Please send me masks."
And I can't.
You make a product that can protect people.
I can't help all these people.
The PPE shortage continued on for months,
even after Trump put one of his most trusted
family members in charge
of procuring protective equipment.
Jared Kushner formed his own task force
to get supplies.
Was that confusing? Like did you...
It was extremely confusing.
The president wanted to make sure
that we had the best people doing the best jobs
and making sure that we had the right people focused
on all the things that needed to happen
to make sure that we can deliver in these unusual times
for the American people.
My old boss called me and said he heard that
Jared Kushner's task force needed younger volunteers
who had general skills and were willing
to work seven days a week for no money,
and if you fit those criteria, that you should head to D.C.
and help with the pandemic response.
I definitely had some apprehension
about working for the administration,
but it felt like the country
and the world were under attack.
It seemed like if there was something to do to help,
that was the right thing to do.
They basically gave us a day
to show up in D.C. at the FEMA Headquarters.
We walked into Conference Room A,
which was this windowless, subterranean conference room.
There were televisions all around the walls
all playing FOX News.
One representative from FEMA
and one representative from the military
gave a quick pep talk.
They kept saying "the stuff," and by that they meant PPE.
And they kept saying, "There's stuff all around the world.
"There's stuff in the U.S., and we need
to get it to hospitals as fast as possible."
Everyone stood up and started filing into different offices,
and I remember the only people left were the volunteers.
We thought we would be auxiliary support
for an existing procurement team that just needed
to be expanded as quickly as possible
and we would, you know, do data entry for contracts.
And instead, we were the team.
I think when people imagined the federal government response
in the war room, they thought it would be this big,
you know, energized group of experts,
not ten 20-year-old volunteers all just with private laptops.
No industry relationships,
no experience working in supply chain.
So we started cold-emailing people we knew
who had business relationships in China,
looking for factories online,
and emailing them from our personal Gmail accounts.
Because we had never done this before,
you know, there were all these really basic questions
about how a federal procurement operation should work.
We would call factories and say,
"We think the federal government can send you a check
in 60 days," and they would say,
"There's someone with a briefcase of cash,
and they are offering to pay me right now."
And we would run around the FEMA building
looking for someone who could tell us what payment terms
the federal government was allowed to offer,
and no one ever told us.
One week into our work, several government employees
walked into the room and handed out NDAs
and told us we had to sign the NDAs
or leave the room immediately,
and we all had built our own relationships
with manufacturers, and it felt like if we walked away,
it would negatively affect our ability
to buy this critical, lifesaving equipment.
And so we all begrudgingly signed the NDA.
In the room, there were those TVs
all around the walls playing the news.
They always had a death counter.
And so every hour we were sitting there,
trying to buy PPE that we all knew could save lives,
and we were watching the number of deaths in the U.S.
tick higher and higher and higher.
And that weighed on all of us.
The president also instructed me to make sure
that I break down every barrier needed
to make sure that the teams can succeed.
The first time Jared Kushner came into the room,
he had this big entourage, and he said,
"I want to make this as effective as possible.
"Tell me the problems that you have,
and I will solve them today."
And we said, "We need to be able to pay upfront."
And he said, "Done,"
but there was no action taken that we saw whatsoever.
In the entire time that I was a volunteer,
our team did not directly purchase a single mask.
Kushner failed to protect doctors and nurses,
but he was willing to trade government help
for political benefits.
When the Democratic Governor of California, Gavin Newsom,
desperately needed testing swabs,
Kushner said Trump would grant the request
on two conditions:
Newsom would have to get on the phone
and ask Trump personally
and then thank him publicly.
I want to thank the president,
not only for being available for a phone call
at a moment's notice, but being willing
to directly commit to all of us in the state of California.
Built around personal relationships,
Kushner's task force was run by his college roommate
and Ivanka Trump's former assistant.
Rather than rely on experienced public officials,
the task force prioritized private tips in a spreadsheet
called "VIP Update,"
which included two Republican dentists
and a FOX News personality.
The whole philosophy of the task force
was that the government can't get things done
and they thought the private market
could largely settle this issue,
but it was only once they had tried and failed
that they'd started to blame other people and say,
"Actually, this was your job the whole time."
You have instances where in cities, they're running out,
but the state still has a stockpile.
And the notion of the federal stockpile
was it's supposed to be our stockpile.
It's not supposed to be states' stockpiles
that they then use.
My understanding is the only reason
the federal stockpile exists is to distribute it to states.
The people in charge on the task force said,
you know, talking about the president...
love him or hate him, he's a marketing genius.
He came up with the strategy to blame the states,
because the federal government
hasn't been able to do this effectively.
Federal government has assets and abilities
that no state can possibly mobilize.
They have a global supply chain.
They have a logistic capability
through the Department of Defense
and Department of Homeland Security
to get stuff in and distribute it
to places all over the country.
President Trump flipped that on its head.
Then there became this mad rush for each and every state
to try and find equipment on their own.
Breaker one nine, this here's Rubber Duck.
Mercy sakes alive,
looks like we've got us a convoy.
We continued to source and ship as much PPE as we can
by whatever means necessary.
♪ Arizona, noon, on the seventh of June ♪
♪ When they highballed over the pass ♪
We had the governor of Massachusetts using a plane
from the New England Patriots to bring equipment from China.
♪ 'Cause we got a little ol' convoy ♪
The equipment is now in the hands of the National Guard,
who will deliver it to an undisclosed location.
♪ Convoy ♪
Whoo-hoo!
We had the governor of Maryland
using contacts of his wife's
to bring equipment in from South Korea.
He felt it important enough to guard that equipment
when it landed in Maryland, because he didn't want it
confiscated by the federal government.
We're competing against every other state,
every other country.
Now we're even competing against the federal government.
It's like being on eBay with 50 other states,
bidding on a ventilator.
You see the bid go up 'cause California bid.
Illinois bid, Florida bid, New York bids,
California rebids.
And then FEMA starts bidding.
So FEMA is driving up the price.
What?
I stand here as someone who has had confirmed orders
for millions of pieces of gear evaporate in front of us,
and I can't tell you how frustrating it is.
I get a feeling if there's somebody had the chance to
sell to you or had the chance to sell to me,
I'm gonna lose every one of those.
All right, Charlie. Thank you very much.
Well, we do like you going out seeing what you can get,
if you can get it faster,
and the price is always a component to that also,
and maybe that's why you lost to the feds.
I'll tell you, that's probably why, but...
If the goal was to get PPE to the states,
why would the federal government
be driving up the price to outbid them?
Or was driving up the price the whole point?
This morning, our first project
that we called Airbridge...
that's Airbridge, that's the name.
And it was a flight that landed in JFK
and contained nearly 2 million masks.
This is the first of 50 flights,
and that will probably increase substantially.
Project Airbridge was a plan to subsidize
the efforts of private companies to buy and sell PPE.
Max Kennedy's team would find the PPE
and negotiate the lowest possible price.
Private companies would then pay the bill.
Then the federal government would pay
to fly the PPE stateside from overseas.
And we had partnered
with the five largest medical distributors.
Once we shipped it to the United States,
they would take over and sell directly
to whoever they would like, at whatever price they wanted.
Just to clarify, that explains why states say
they're bidding like they're on eBay,
because the supplies are going to the private sector,
and then they have to go there to get the supplies.
That's normally how things work, right?
So I'm not here to disrupt,
uh, a supply chain.
The U.S. government was handing a huge amount
of business to these five companies
that were chosen fairly arbitrarily.
There were increasing concerns, I think, from competitors,
that these five companies were getting
a hugely unfair advantage,
and so I was asked on several different occasions explicitly
to find a justification to have selected these companies way...
you know, months after they had been selected.
At least one of these companies, Cardinal,
saw its PPE orders surge to 12 times the normal volume.
Profit-making was also part of
the pandemic pricing plan at Gilead,
which manufactured the one drug, Remdesivir,
that was effective at treating COVID.
The federal government owned patents on the drug,
and it paid for essential research.
But the Trump administration permitted Gilead
to charge more than $3,000 a patient
for a treatment that cost less than $10 to manufacture.
I left in mid-April, and my takeaway
was really that I still feel like
I haven't worked for the government.
We were so far outside of it. I mean, we were...
every single person we reported to
up the chain of command was a political appointee.
The number of FEMA employees I met, you know,
I could count on one hand,
and they were fleeting interactions.
It taught me about how this administration works,
and I think it largely works, or it seemed to work,
in this case, outside of the government.
In the course of three years,
there was a systematic dismantling
of what expertise had been built
and what framework had been built
to respond to the very kind of global pandemic
that we're dealing with.
It's preventing the people who were there
from doing the jobs that they'd been hired to do.
Tell me a little bit about how chloroquine
and hydroxychloroquine first came into your point of view.
You know...
How did this come up?
I wish I'd never heard of chloroquine
or hydroxychloroquine, honestly.
Elon Musk started the ball rolling with a tweet.
Momentum for the drugs picked up steam
over the next few days on FOX News,
where their names were dropped 176 times.
Early evidence suggests that chloroquine...
- Chloroquine. - Hydroxychloroquine.
Those look very promising.
Then Trump started reading from the FOX script.
It is known as a malaria drug,
and it's been around for a long time.
And it's shown very encouraging...
very, very encouraging... early results.
I believe it was March 23rd.
I got a call from Secretary Azar's chief counsel.
The White House wanted us to move quickly
on making this drug available.
At my direction, the federal government is working to help
obtain large quantities of chloroquine.
I called my scientific team in BARDA,
and they said, "No way."
There was no data to support that they had any benefit
against the coronavirus.
They pushed back, but Dr. Kadlec reiterated
that directive to us and said, "Get on it, get it done."
We came up with option of an emergency use authorization.
We could put boundaries in it,
restrict the drug to only be used
in people who are hospitalized.
And I was proud of our team
for coming up with that compromise
that we thought would protect the Americans.
Have you ever heard of a Dr. Zelenko?
Yes.
He is a very mysterious presence that seemed to be
involved in the context of this chloroquine story.
- Hi. - Hi.
Dr. Vladimir Zelenko became a right-wing folk hero
and the Trump team promoted him as an essential expert
on the use of hydroxychloroquine
as a magical remedy for COVID.
For the last almost 16 years,
I've been a primary care doctor for a community
of around 35,000 people.
It's a village in the town of Monroe.
It's similar to an urban environment
in terms of how close people live with each other.
So it's not surprising that
the virus came and started spreading.
And I realized that, my God, I have an inferno.
I have a real outbreak.
I know all these people, they're like family to me.
So it was personal.
The whole world was focusing on
building more respirators, more hospitals,
and there was nothing being offered
to primary care doctors.
You know, we're front-line soldiers
with no bullets, no weapons.
So then you have to improvise.
Dr. Zelenko improvised
what he thought was a magic bullet
that contained his own unproven mash-up
of zinc, azithromycin, and hydroxychloroquine.
But there was no reputable clinical trial
that confirmed Zelenko's claims
that early use of his cocktail could cure COVID.
I wasn't doing research. I was just treating patients.
But I'm not stupid.
I saw exactly what was happening.
Patients stopped dying.
I just found potentially
one of the most important pieces of information
in the history of information.
I'm not a politician. I don't have any connections.
So how else does a person who's unconnected
reach the highest levels of government?
It's called social media.
Um, hello, President Trump.
My name is Dr. Vladimir Zelenko.
So I made a YouTube video
addressed to the president of the United States,
and the next day, his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, calls me.
We had a conversation, and that started a process
that eventually led me to
the FDA commissioner, Stephen Hahn.
It's not every day you get
the commissioner of the FDA calling you on your cell phone.
According to the FDA...
There was not a scientific reason
to push either one of those drugs.
The reason they were pushing them so hard was because
the president was claiming that they were a miracle drug.
Someone had given him this advice.
I happen to be taking it. I happen to be taking it.
I'm taking it. Hydroxychloroquine.
Right now, yeah.
Did you hear what he said afterwards?
"Yeah, I received a letter..."
From a doctor the other day,
from Westchester, New York, around the area.
He didn't want anything. He just said,
"Sir, I have hundreds of patients,
and I give them hydroxychloroquine."
So that was a letter
I sent to the president.
But I thought it was a very well-crafted letter
by a man who's a respected doctor.
He said it was a well-crafted letter.
I was proud of that.
It was really frustrating,
because here we are on the front lines,
we're trying to do everything we can,
and if, you know, there's a chance that this could work,
let's go ahead and try it.
But then, consistently,
the trials that had been high quality looking at this
have shown that there's no benefit to it.
And we have moved on to other therapies.
But unfortunately, you know, it can come back and be revived
by a tweet from a leader who still believes in it.
The next day, if you admit
a patient with COVID-19, some of them are gonna ask,
"Are you gonna give me the Trump drug?"
And if you go through a long explanation of, you know,
"Actually, there's no benefit,"
it's really hard to explain this.
And it would be so much more helpful
if the leader of the country, who sets the example, said,
"We should follow the science on this."
I've seen things that I sort of like,
so what do I know? I'm not a doctor.
It was about six days after that EUA.
I woke up to an email string
that had our Assistant Secretary for Health,
our Director of FEMA, our ASPR, Dr. Kadlec,
and the FDA all saying we need to flood the streets
of New York and New Jersey
with that drug as quickly as possible.
And in that email discussion, someone was brave enough...
they said, "But wait a minute.
The EUA says 'for hospitalized patients only.'"
They said, "No, it needs to go into the pharmacies.
"It needs to go out everywhere.
"The EUA doesn't matter.
Push the drug out now."
The same FDA that dragged its feet for weeks
at approving vital COVID tests
suddenly worked at lightning speed to greenlight use
of a drug with no proven effect on the disease,
just because the White House wanted it done.
If this drug works,
it will be wonderful, it'll be so beautiful.
It'll be a gift from heaven.
I lost it.
I lost all respect for that chain of command,
for that security
that we as Americans have put in those people.
And that is the moment that I decided to break protocol
and alert Americans in a different way.
In the doctrine of politics,
Rick Bright committed a mortal sin.
He went to the press.
It was two weeks exactly after that
that I learned that I had been removed from my position.
It's not easy to come forward in this administration, okay?
I'm not trying to be soft in here, but it is not easy.
It was a very hard process
to lay our careers on the line to push back.
Time is running out because
the virus is still spreading everywhere.
The window is closing to address this pandemic.
So, you know, Dr. Bright is up there testifying today.
And on hydroxychloroquine, Dr. Bright literally signed
in the application for FDA authorization of it.
We will either be remembered for what we did
or for what we failed to do to address this crisis.
I watched this guy for a little while this morning,
and he looks like an angry, disgruntled employee
who, frankly, according to some people,
didn't do a very good job.
Would you describe the government's response
as a success or a failure?
I believe we could have done better.
Watching the administration's response
to Bright was frightening.
We all wanted to help, but we didn't wanna be
on the front page of a newspaper.
I spoke to a couple of attorneys
who said it's so unusual for the government
to require an NDA at all, let alone for volunteers
who don't have any access to government systems.
We had no access to any confidential information.
The only thing we were basically being prevented
from talking about was the fact that the response was...
seemed to be largely bungled.
To date, we've facilitated the supply
of more than 38 million N95 masks nationwide.
And I would watch the news, and I'd hear
the Trump administration talk about the work
that was happening, and what was happening did not
match what the administration was speaking about.
So I did send in
a whistleblower report to Congress,
as well as calling several journalists
who I basically just found online.
It was nerve-racking.
I was worried about the NDA,
I was worried about potential retribution.
But I just wanted people to know what was happening,
and know not enough was being done.
Beyond attacking whistleblowers,
Trump dismissed five inspectors general
in the space of six weeks.
One had raised concerns about PPE shortages.
Another was supposed to investigate
how the Trump administration would spend
$2.3 trillion in coronavirus relief.
While money did flow to unemployed Americans,
a small group of hedge fund investors
and real estate tycoons,
like Jared Kushner and Donald Trump,
got millions of dollars in tax breaks.
Trump protected the richest Americans,
even as he continued to ignore the most basic recommendations
of scientists trying to protect everyday people.
The CDC is recommending that
Americans wear a basic cloth or fabric mask.
They can be either purchased online or simply made at home,
probably material that you'd have at home.
Really a voluntary thing. You can do it.
You don't have to do it. I'm choosing not to do it.
But some people may wanna do it, and that's okay.
I made a lot of predictions that came true
about this pandemic, but masks being politicized...
it's just amazing to me.
♪ Live and let die ♪
♪ ♪
The deadly implications
of the president's disdain for science
weren't lost on whoever picked the soundtrack
for Trump's tour of a mask factory in Arizona.
♪ Live and let die ♪
♪ ♪
It was confusing campaign photo op:
federal officials refusing to wear safety masks
in a sanitized factory that manufactured them.
The mask seems to represent
which side of the political aisle that you're on,
and somehow, showing up without a mask on
in close proximity with others
says that I support the president.
You're fucking democratic pigs!
I'll take that fucking mask off your face!
No more masks!
That is dangerous.
People have died because of the misinformation.
I have absolutely no doubt about that.
In April, after weeks of economic shutdown
and with contagion and death
still running high in much of America,
Trump announced the plan for reopening the country.
Our team of experts now agrees
that we can begin the next front in our war,
which we're calling Opening Up America Again,
and that's what we're doing.
We're opening up our country.
The next day, he began to tweet
in encouragement of protests against lockdowns
meant to contain spread of the virus.
Frustration's understandable.
People wanted to get out of their homes
to get back to work.
USA!
But without a national program
to safeguard public health,
how is the economy going to get back on its feet?
So I said to my people,
"Slow the testing down, please."
Texas, hitting a record number of hospitalizations.
Florida recording an astonishing 11,400 cases,
smashing its single day high.
Opening up the country without
a national program for masks, testing, and tracing
did have consequences.
Throughout the summer,
the death toll hovered around 1,000 a day,
or two 9/11s every week.
In South Korea, a nation of 51 million,
there was no national shutdown,
and less than 500 people died from the disease.
For a lot of people around me in South Korea,
perceptions of the U.S. have really been shaken.
South Koreans, like a lot of other people around the world,
had a certain perception of the U.S.
as a barometer and a benchmark for how a country works,
how a country should run.
There is a real sense of disbelief.
Thousands descended on beaches
in Greece over the weekend, while in Italy,
more shops and restaurants are again welcoming customers.
The crowds are returning
to the stadiums here in New Zealand.
As many countries opened up,
others faced new outbreaks.
Some, like Brazil and India, saw cases continue to soar.
But even in countries like South Korea,
where the virus was initially contained,
cases spiked when people ignored scientific guidance.
Nowhere was that problem more severe
than in the United States.
♪ America, America ♪
Ignoring expert advice became an act
of patriotism in the Trump administration,
Where even the push for a safe vaccine
was pursued with reckless disregard for science.
We're moving aggressively
to accelerate developing a vaccine.
To actually get a vaccine that you know works
is gonna be a year to a year and a half.
Do me a favor. Speed it up.
Stakes are so high around vaccines.
Because we need a vaccine
if we want to begin to end this pandemic.
But the question is, who distributes it?
Who prioritizes it?
A lot of people say this should be the CDC.
"They should be front and center in this."
But the CDC has been largely silenced.
After a few CDC scientists
voiced concerns about the federal response,
Trump installed an official to censor or rewrite
any CDC findings that contradicted
the rosy predictions of the White House.
Can we trust scientists who allow data to be compromised
by demands for political loyalty?
My last question to you is,
what is your personal takeaway from this pandemic?
Um...
53,000 deaths from coronavirus.
Sometimes late at night when I'm driving home
and I'm tired of listening to talk radio on NPR,
I'll turn on the other NPR station and listen to jazz.
I've never listened to jazz in my life.
I've always been very thankful for the people around me,
and I think that's come with age, partly.
And now that we're all wearing masks all the time,
there is an astounding amount of information
that you can get out of looking at people's eyes.
Which, when the rest of your face is completely obscured,
become extremely telling of what's going on,
whether your eyes are happy or sad or smiling.
This is going to be the 1918 influenza epidemic story,
and it will be written about for the next 100 years.
And I think that realization should really drive
a lot of our behavior and our choices.
There's so much that the virus has exposed,
the lessons are just gonna be ongoing over time.
And the degree of suffering is just so immense
that it's hard to really conceptualize it.
And it's gonna take a long time for us
to really figure out the consequences of this,
because there are consequences
for the people who survive this.
We spend billions of dollars every year
on missiles that, hopefully, will never fly,
on weapons that, hopefully, we will never use.
We have to take health security
as seriously as we do defense security.
I think the career staff and scientists were in place.
They were battle-tested.
They knew their role, they knew the plan,
and they were prepared to act.
They put on their uniform to respond to this pandemic,
and then there was nowhere to go.
There is a misconception that public health failed.
The truth is that political leaders
failed to follow public health guidance,
and that's what caused avoidable disease, death,
and economic destruction.
Politicians are the problem.
We've gotta believe in the scientists.
And we've got politicians who don't believe in science.
America is lagging behind
every other country, almost, in their response, and I...
hey, you gotta blame the manager.
If we're to blame the manager,
we must be able to answer
an essential political question:
What did the president know, and when did he know it?
Eight months after the pandemic began,
we got the answer.
On February 7th, two weeks before
anyone in America had died from the disease,
journalist Bob Woodward asked Donald Trump
if he knew how contagious and dangerous COVID might be.
It goes through air, Bob.
That's always tougher than the touch, you know?
The touch, you don't have to touch things, right?
But the air, you just breathe the air,
and that's how it's passed.
It's also more deadly than your...
even your strenuous flus, you know?
So this is deadly stuff.
Our manager failed us.
But the disease also revealed
more fundamental problems with our government.
We will see more pandemics and other existential threats.
All on account of manmade problems,
we must prepare to solve together.
Our ability to reckon with the future
will depend on how much we learn from our recent past.
When the day comes when we can finally take off our masks,
will we be ready to fix what's really broken?
♪ Time has come today ♪
♪ Young hearts can go their way ♪
♪ Can't put it off another day ♪
♪ I don't care what others say ♪
♪ They think we don't listen anyway ♪
♪ Time has come today ♪
Hey!
Oh!
♪ The rules have changed today ♪
♪ I have no place to stay ♪
♪ I'm thinking about the subway ♪
♪ My love has flown away ♪
♪ My tears have come and gone ♪
♪ Oh my Lord, I have to roam ♪
♪ I have no home ♪
♪ Now the time has come ♪
♪ There's no place to run ♪
♪ I might get burned up by the sun ♪
♪ But I had my fun ♪
♪ I've been loved and put aside ♪
♪ I've been crushed by the tumbling tide ♪
♪ And my soul ♪
Subtitles by explosiveskull www.OpenSubtitles.org