Totally Under Control: Trump’s Bungling of COVID-19 Pandemic Laid Bare in Timely Doc

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

The prolific Oscar-winning documentary director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Dirty Money) is celebrated for turning his camera on American society’s dark side but he has almost too much to handle with Totally Under Control, a retrospective look at U.S. government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The film may be of more use to the history books (Gibney has called it a “report card”) than aid to those of us still aboard the mad voyage of Captain Contagious. Though most of the content here is too familiar for the film to qualify as an exposé, Totally Under Control adds background context and highlights some of the voices who raised early alarms about the dangers of the disease and the impending social disruption.

Working with co-directors Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan, Gibney used a variety of strategies to shoot the film safely: video conferencing, sending sterilized cameras to interview subjects, and shooting other subjects in studio through peepholes in plastic sheeting.

The interviews, along with a dense collage of archival news clips, are bridged by Gibney’s voice-over, in which he doesn’t hesitate to editorialize. (“Ignoring expert advice became an act of patriotism.”) The timing of this fast-track documentary, a sort of two-hour outrage reel, is surely aimed at influencing the November 3 election.

Although the COVID infection rates and death statistics are still a moving target, Gibney begins with a useful comparison point. On January 20 of this year, both United States and South Korea announced their first confirmed case of the COVID-19 virus.

South Korea, which had already established protocols on widespread testing and contact tracing following the mishandling of the 2015 outbreak known as MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome-related coronavirus), had a clear game plan, a national strategy.

Without a national lockdown, South Korea lost just over 400 lives in a population of 52 million people. By contrast, in a population of 330 million, the U.S. tanked its economy, while 215,000 people have died to date. To put it another way, about 20 percent of the COVID deaths have taken place within 4.5 percent of the world’s population.

Each decision in the first weeks following the first cases was critical, and Gibney includes a ticker-style chyron of the dates. American scientists had been watching what was happening in Wuhan, China, and were anticipating the possible pandemic.

Two days before the first U.S. case, Rick Bright — the head of the federal agency in charge of testing, drugs and vaccines, BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) — asked for an emergency meeting with Alex Azar, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Bright explains in the film how he outlined a strategy for dealing with the impending pandemic. But Azar, a former pharmaceutical lobbyist and executive, downplayed the threat and seemed offended at the proposed $10 billion price tag.

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Azar did break the news to POTUS, who was on the golf course before his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, but he presented it with a “we got this” good news spin he knew Trump would want to hear.

Subsequently, the lack of communication between the Federal Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control delayed the response. After that came a flawed CDC test kit and the muddled Chinese immigration ban, adding up to what New York Times White House correspondent Michael Shear calls the “lost month” in the pandemic response.

Bright subsequently lost his job, after which he went to the media with his concerns about the anti-malarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, which the Trump administration forced the FDA to promote. In one of the few blackly comic moments in the documentary, we also hear from Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a New York village doctor, whose social media posts earned the White House’s attention. He then wrote a personal letter containing “some of the most important information in the history of information” to convince Trump of the benefits of his hydroxychloroquine cocktail.

Perhaps the most breathtaking example of the intersection of stupid and evil comes from testimony about Jared Kushner’s shadow COVID task force. Here we have another whistleblower, Max Kennedy. Kennedy describes how a group of inexperienced unpaid volunteers using their personal laptops and emails were left with the task of procuring personal protection equipment from foreign countries.

The government eventually stepped in, not to buy the protective equipment for frontline workers, but to subsidize five companies who made obscene profits by creating bidding wars between state and the federal governments.

Gibney’s documentary is current enough to include the revelations from Bob Woodward’s mid-September book, Rage, and Trump’s October 2 announcement that he and his wife, Melania, had contracted COVID. At the pace that Trump generates fresh outrages, Totally Under Control, already feels several documentary films ago.

Totally Under Control. Directed by Alex Gibney, Ophelia Haurtyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger. With Scott Becker, Taison Bell, Michael Bowen, Rick Bright, Beth Cameron, Caroline Chen, Tom Frieden, Alex Greninger, Kim Jin Yong, Max Kennedy, Victoria Kim, James Lawler, Eva Lee, Francis Riedo, Kathleen Sebelius, Michael Shea and Vladimir Zelenko. Available October 13 on various video-on-demand services, including iTunes and Google Play.