ated and people here believe it's only a matter of time before the radioactive water finds its way to these shores the leaf family says even if discovered in the tiniest amounts any radiation in fish stocks would ruin its business. if there is even a slight problem it would harm not only trust in japan but also confidence in our fish so i think it's not just south korea but all countries that should be concerned nearly 10 years on from the devastating tsunami the legacy of it might be about to deliver another unwelcome shock rob mcbride al jazeera j island south korea. this is our desire these are the top stories france's reimposing a nation wide lockdown to fight a surge of covert 19 infections president somalia will mark wrong send restrictions were necessary because curfews in some cities in recent weeks didn't work and

germany is imposing a partial lockdown for next monday to try to stop the record rise infections there proposed restrictions include closing cafes bars theaters and restaurants as well as limiting social contact a former u.s. homeland security official has admitted to being the white house insider who wrote a scathing op i had 2 years ago condemning donald trump miles teller supporting joe biden and it's called trump a moral petty and ineffective mike hanna has more from washington d.c. . e.-man who called himself anonymous in 2 separate books and actually an out at president trump has now revealed his identity in an online post miles tailors his name and he was a chief of staff in the department of homeland security at one point so a very senior official he was highly critical of trump in those 2 books saying that it was necessary for americans to know both the character and the quality of their

head of state as a by john has accused the army of killing at least 21 civilians in a missile strike bringing a 3rd attempt at a cease fire and to direct the attack on the city of daraa is the deadliest single incident against civilians since fighting flared a month ago i can see it has made landfall in the southern us bringing another round of heavy rain and damaging winds to the state of louisiana there are warnings the category 2 storm could bring a life threatening storm surges after earlier hitting southern mexico zita is the 5th named storm to slam into louisiana this year. virgil has been held to remember 13 children killed in a raid on a school in cameroon's english speaking region although no one has claimed responsibility for the attack the government says separatists are behind the killings in. and those are the headlines the news continues here on al-jazeera in about half an hour after the bottom line good buy.

hi i'm steve clements and i have a question in the last days of the u.s. election is the coronavirus going to trump trump let's get to the bottom line. over 1000 has taken the lives of more than 220000 americans and the number just keeps rising when this show did its 1st programme on the potential impact of the pandemic back on february 11th we hadn't heard of a single american death from the virus now in an election year dealing with a pandemic has trumped all the other issues on the minds of americans and how couldn't it in the end it's about the life and death of those we work with or we live near or we cherish today we dive into this administration's handling of the

corona virus and what it tells us about the mindset of the people leading america we're joined by dr rick bright an immunologist in vaccine expert who had a front seat in government as the coronavirus pandemic exploded earlier this year he was pushed out of his job as director of the us by a medical advance research and development authority i know it is varda after he raised alarm bells about the direction the trump administration was taking and now he's filed a whistleblower complaint against the federal government and academy award winning filmmaker alex give me who's just come out with a film that documents the response of the administration to the coronavirus it's called totally under control and the title comes from an actual quote from president trump last january when he said quote it's going to be just fine gentlemen it's great to have you with us today alex let me start out and ask you when i watched your tremendous film that i think is so highly consequential about this time it reminded me of another film chair noble it reminded me of the assault

on expertise on the on the dismissal of facts on the ground and i guess my question to you is this in your mind america's chair noble. yeah i mean. sometimes it's very much worse i mean i think that. what was interesting to us when we started this film and it was we started the film just trying to investigate you know what was going on with the federal response to the pandemic it was like the old buffalo springfield song you know there's something happening here what it is ain't exactly clear and we wanted to know what that was but as we pursued it and and tried to get to the bottom of it what was clear was that there was an assault on science and it was assault on science for political purposes it was the willingness politicians to try to corrupt the science and the science is what was or could have protected us and that's what was so chilling about this entire

story because as real as rick will tell you the more devastating news here is that this is not a story in ministration that was unprepared in fact they had a rather robust playbook for how to operate under in a pandemic from the obama administration but even more telling they had a playbook that rick wright helped to write you know that was finished in october 2019 just a couple of months before the the pandemic you know we had our 1st covert patient test positive so the plan was there but they refused to take it off the shelf which makes it even more damning and disturbing rick you're one of the heroes in this documentary but there were others though the doctors in seattle i mean even the patients who were you know in this world of confusion but you saw them voluntarily going through this process when did you know that there was

a divergence between the respect for science and the process and and really the political order taking us a different direction. well steve is sad to say but i think from the very beginning i mean because we had practice in exercised and reviewed everything that would be required to respond to pandemic just a couple months before this crisis really started emerging we all knew and it was really in a meeting in late january when our secretary of health and human services like ses are called a meeting of some of his scientific expertise that i brought up some of those were really critical points that we needed to do immediately and in that very 1st meeting is when those met those instructions that task lists were response was met with indifference as was basically ridiculed and pushed out of the room i read

flagged as early with our assistant secretary preparedness response the one person who is charged with coordinating all the response for such event in our country in january 18th and said we need to convene a meeting and his response to me was i don't see a sense of urgency so it was clear to me that from the very beginning it only became even more clear as time went on that this administration the trump administration had a narrative that they wanted to believe had a narrative they want to follow that was everything's ok it's not a problem is under control and i saw scientists saying the other wise that is not we had to act and each of those scientists was one by one pushed aside pushed out or just completely ignored you know i want to play a sound clip of president trump speaking at the debates recently about testing we have to open up and we understand the disease we have to protect our seniors we

have to protect our elderly we have to protect especially our seniors with heart problems and diabetes problems and we will protect we have the best testing in the world by far that's why we have so many cases let me follow up and so was the president saying we've got the best testing regime in the world what is the truth separate truth from fiction for us rick. the president said a lot of an important thing is in that sentence however the actions have not followed any of those things we haven't tested since the very beginning we were months behind the curve in getting testing we were bringing in allowing people to come in from from china and europe without any type of testing or tracing system in place and we were very slow to get our testing up and running and it's still not adequate per we need to get this pandemic under control we haven't protected the old 80 percent of the people who have died from this outbreak in the united states have been over 65 we haven't protected the vulnerable which are those with

underlying health conditions or our black and latino populations we have failed in every one of those areas that you just saw that mr trump saying that we should be doing a good job and so lip service is one thing action is what we've been missing in leadership from day one allison me ask you the same question when you were in the film you profiled the united states against a small much smaller nation south korea tell us about that contrast on testing ok well let's remember both south korea and the united states had their 1st positive test of a covert patient on january 20th united states doesn't have any kind of testing program until around late february i believe it was february 26th i may get that slightly wrong but late february in south korea. they had a robust testing and tracing program in place on january 27th at 7 days

after they had the 1st positive patient in seoul so that's a pretty impressive record now you know south korea was had learned some lessons as a result of its mers operate but we have learned lessons too and as i said before we had the. playbook we just didn't use it and what's remarkable even more jaw dropping is we include. a section from a press conference in which. health and human services secretary alex ase are described as you know how do you respond to a pandemic like this and he goes through test team quarantine contact tracing it all seems so smart and so reasonable don't mean problem was there were no test kits there was no national plan there was no contact tracing when the whole thing was a mirage and so it. really raises the fundamental question of. why

because testing must be understood is the key diagnostic tool to understanding how an invisible disease that spreading fast you want to know where it's going how far it spread it's the only way you know and on purpose it seems the trumpet ministration refused to test in part because it seems that the trumpet ministration didn't want to know how many patients were positive which was a terrible thing that's what allowed the virus to spread and i think is the greatest crime that this administration committed well you know another dimension of this film that made me want to pull all my hair out that i have left was the issue that when they did get a test out that an indicator had been added that was unnecessary and that was it was sort of one of 3 vectors that wasn't necessary then when they finally turned that around as i understand it the you know some battles between the f.d.a. and the centers for disease control they ended up using the same tests that they

had an old and so you had their how many weeks 56 weeks rick where that test that they had disavowed and then got used how many people died in that period of time because our government agencies couldn't get their act together. well let's see as how part of that and why did that virus spread to her in that time because if we were testing at that time we could have isolated the people who are in fact it we could have actually slow the spread of that virus across our country and in the sector is our it was the person responsible he's in charge of the c.d.c. he's over the f.d.a. he has all of the resources at his fingertips all the expertise all he had to do it any time was to bring up the problem and solve the problem and align the staff to get it done but he failed to do that again during this time he had meetings we had discussions about it but never once did he have had that sense of urgency and

concern that this virus was getting out of control he was in complete denial and just following the same narrative as president trump i do want to i want to say one thing that emphasize what alex just mentioned when he said that secretary as i was on the stage saying the important things we need to do were to test and trace and isolate and have a plan in place what's critical to know is today in the bottle were. we still don't have any of that in place we still don't have a national plan we still don't have a testing strategy we didn't have a testing and tracing action plan in place so even though we can fall to a lot of the issues that happened or didn't happen in january february march and april we're now in on it over almost november and we still haven't put those things in place in our country alex you have done so many documentaries on essentially the

failures of government the failures of ethics if you will with those that have been put in positions of power whether it's you know the enron case or no end in sight with the iraq invasion and you know audit on jack abbott i'm off is this a case where people should is what we've seen unfold criminal should we see an accountability process people indicted for what they've done or didn't do well that's a judgment for the department of justice to me but it but i will tell you as a filmmaker operating in the court of public opinion you know i began it is you know not to as a political film but as a film about competence and what i discovered was incompetence that to me rose to the level of a crime film and the and. and the crimes in my view again this is from the court of public opinion or fraud and incompetence rick. there is

a section in the film that i sort of fell your emotional stress broke at a point and and if i have it remembered correctly it's when. the government was planning to essentially flood the streets and flood the pharmacies in new york and elsewhere with hydroxyl chloroquine which has been since judged as as you know not only ineffective in treating cove it but potentially dangerous to some patients particularly brazil who died i'm just sort of interested in what that moment was and i want to convey to my audience how hard it is for a government official like yourself who's given so much to the public to decide to take the act you did which resulted in severe consequences. was. you know my whole life i prepared and play and had a goal to do everything i could to respond to a pandemic in

a save lives every every job every position i've ever tackled was focused on saving lives and when this pandemic emerged there are so many moving parts back scene development drug development testing development that we were trying to track and monitor and when i got the call from the secretary as our as office that the white house wanted us to to put everything aside basically and focus only on making chloroquine to drastic work when available bryden easy access to people across america it was it was a broadside is a slap in the face corporate all scientists and all clinicians however we did what we could as experts to try to put in place a plan that would include a lot of safety bumpers a lot of barriers to ensure that anyone who was exposed to those drugs before we

had high quality clinical data would not be exposed to those unless they were under close care and attention from by a physician in a hospital setting and confirmed to me in fact that with this corona virus so lots of c. d. barriers and we were comfortable that our public health leaders the people we put in charge in trust in america to lead us through and protect us through public health events would follow those guidelines and i woke up one morning to an e-mail string that had a directive from the white house to take these unproven dangerous drugs actually it wasn't that they were just unproven and just dangerous they were also being shipped into our country from pakistan in factories in pakistan and india that had never been inspected or passed seed safety inspections by the f.d.a.

. but the directive was to flood the streets of new york in new jersey basically just roll these drugs out to everyone in new york and new jersey across america and signed off on that directive was our secretary's office of health and human services the f.d.a. commissioner the assistant secretary for health the assistant secretary for preparedness response the director of fema who was also a leading major components of this outbreak at that point every single person above me put in charge to protect and save american lives and agreed to push this out at the directive of the white house i had no choice i did have a choice actually i could be complicit i can sit back and do nothing and watch these drugs go out and watch people potentially die from exposure to these drugs or i could break protocol and step outside our agreement our plans our

structure in speak to the public in a different way and it was a it was a painful decision because i knew that by stepping out of protocol i was going to face retaliation i was going to face the ire of our government our president and our our infrastructure and in the department and to me it was more important to save those lives to protect americans and make sure everyone knew the real risk of getting these drugs and using these drugs in appropriately and mr as i did make that notification available the wrath of this administration came on me almost immediately within a week i was pushed out of my position i was sidelined i was muzzled and no longer in that active leadership role to try to stem the tide of this pandemic.

wow alex you know listening to rick and what he went through and many of the other people you interviewed one of the parts of the show that really struck me were was not only a los angeles times correspondent in seoul but doctors in seoul korea that were looking at the united states as having been the leader for them in their own studies of pandemics you know the you know essentially looking at the u.s. as one of the great bellwethers in how to deal with these things and looking with with somewhat of shame and shock at what had happened and i guess my question to you is you know when you hear the chief of staff to the president of the united states mark meadows say we're not going to control the virus now we're going to just let you know i'm just as it is america america i mean this is this this is a serious thing as you said but how is this happening and how is the world looking at us right now well i think the world is looking at us. with

a mixture of sadness and pity i mean we have failed utterly and i would argue you know we can look at the trumpet administration as being unique but i think actually the trumpet administration in many ways is fulfilling a dream of some you know. radical republicans whose mission was to destroy the government well in the case of the response to took over had they've succeeded they destroyed the government response what could have been a robust and powerful government response i mean you mentioned south korea the doctor we interviewed dr kim who had treated the 1st covert patient you know recalls that you know much of his studies revolved around epidemiological studies that were derived from the the c.d.c. the american c.d.c. the centers for disease control he remarked that the end 95 mask and been developed

by the united states the world look to the united states as a leader in public health and now we are where the laggard 4 percent of the world's population 20 percent of the world's deaths but far more profoundly and administration that actually. it's almost does worse than nothing. in this context i mean you know president trump on in the debate the other night said that actually could have been bad it could have been 2000000 deaths well that was one person's estimate for what would have happened if the government did absolutely nothing well this is. that's that's barely a claim the idea that that you're better than nothing is the campaign claim but actually in some ways this administration is almost worse than nothing because they're proclaiming proudly that they're not going to have any kind of governmental

response and this was not only in terms of the testing because you can you can see by the way in terms of. what rick said about drugs a clerk when when they want to move the levers of government they move very fast to flood the streets of. america with high drugs a cork when but when it was a matter of fixing the testing problem which they could have done right off the bat they refused because they didn't want to actually reveal that that people in america had the disease right even worse was the so-called gerrard cushion or. task force and. you know the task of finding p.p. which which turned out to be nothing more than 10. 20 something volunteers on their g. mail account on their g. mail accounts googling where was p.p. and they went down to help what they thought would be you know a professionalized operation right scuppered that actually they were appointed to

be the only ones who were going to be in charge of finding p.p. eve for the doctors and nurses who desperately needed it to stay alive right. well it's very very sobering rick i'm going to give you the last word today and just ask you know the president you know recently basically we saw him again on the film that the president had talked to bob woodward the writer. way back in january acknowledging the seriousness the deadliness of this virus my question to you as things stand now and we're around the corner from an election the american public might reelect donald trump how in danger you know the people involved you know the system you know the structure what could be just in short form the consequences to this country if it if it doesn't you know up its game. see we're we're in a lot of trouble we're headed in per very major surge of the virus infecting more

people increased hospitalizations increased number of deaths we're headed into a really dark winter we're going to have coronavirus cases on top of employees and cases our hospitals are going to be overwhelmed we need new leadership urgently that's going to put a pandemic response plan in place that's going to support the production of personal protective equipment to protect our health care workers that's going to implement a nationwide testing plan a strategy that's tied to public health practices such as tracing and isolation we need leaders who will lead by example not have super spreading events spreading the virus across our country but instead will exhibit good leadership by wearing face mask and social distancing and encouraging others to do so if we do not have this change of leadership in change of strategy this virus will continue to

overtake us we will lose millions of people have millions of people in fact it and that original 2000000 number might actually come true if the trumpet ministrations plan is to throw in the towel and just let the virus rip through the population of america. and that is what they seem to be doing now and they're doing a very good job at that then america is in for a really dark winter in a really dark season and we're going to lose a lot of our parents and grandparents and it's going to take a long time to recover. on that sobering message i'd like to thank you both for being with us dr rick wright a leading immunologist and virus researcher formerly working for the u.s. government has just filed a whistleblower complaint and filmmaker alex gibney who's just come out with an

amazing documentary on the way the trump administration managed the response the coronavirus panic called totally under control watch it so what's the bottom line when we meet again next week the american people will have decided which america they want either it's 4 more years of donald trump who subordinate scientists and public health officials to his everything is great and totally under control political apparatchiks or to joe biden presidency which will respect scientists but still inherit a deeply divided country where an untold number of americans will die from the virus where wearing masks is considered a political act and where trust in the health system and even in vaccines is in doubt that's the bigger problem and that's the bottom line.

'd held for over 3 years in an egyptian prison so denied the right to a fair trial no charges have been brought against al jazeera correspondent you're saying this crime journalist. to demand new truths and going solidarity with all detained journalists sign the petition. 'd you say. he began with a move and to bring it just here i got shot i fall down i felt like i was that a documentary filmmaker once granted unconditional assigner contrasts his experiences with those seeking refuge today and intimate you know of the

consequences of the policies of detainments is really unnecessary all this misery they cannot absorb this number that people have to suffer in this way it is unacceptable and refugees tell you on al-jazeera. i'm about as an indoor how the top stories on al-jazeera france will enter a national lockdown for a 2nd time on friday to fight a surge of covert $1000.00 infections which is sweeping across europe presidents emanuel knuckles said curfews imposed in major cities 2 weeks ago failed to slow down a 2nd wave of cases and sasha battle reports she decided in a soviet t.v. address french president emanuel said a new lockdown was necessary because france's health situation had deteriorated

rapidly. want creators of in mali partly because of what we learned it's bring down will be adapted.