The day I felt like I was in the scary final scene of 'Don't Look Up'

If you have not yet seen the movie and intend to watch it, do not continue reading this article. Spoilers here.

Originally written for TrialSiteNews.

The final scene of "Don't Look Up", when everyone is at the dinner table waiting for the end of the world, has everything to become memorable in the history of cinema. From now on, it is to be in any compilation of unforgettable scenes, along with Gene Kelly and his umbrella in "Singing in The Rain," with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman's kiss in "Casablanca," with the students climbing on the tables in "Dead Poets Society," as well as others, such as the scene of the bicycle taking off in "E.T.".

Not that this film is a masterpiece. I can definitely say: it is not a " Citizen Kane". But even bad movies have memorable scenes, like the pottery scene with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in "Ghost". In this case, the dining room scene touched me because I have felt at a similar table.

The beginning of the story of "Don't Look Up," a Netflix release, is similar to all the tragedy movies made by Hollywood: scientists talking and being ignored. A quick summary of the whole story? Big corporations capturing and running governments, sabotaging cheap solutions for profit, silencing dissident scientists, and bringing in expensive solutions that don't work.

But although the beginning of the script was the same old, uncreative, there was one focus that made the film interesting: showing how a society can become completely anesthetized. This happens when captured government agencies, large corporations, and a press that refuses to do its job all decide to play together in the same orchestra.

In the movie, the government even creates a slogan: "Don't look up". It was the meteor coming, already visible, but the order was not to look up. It was the undeniable truth in front of everyone. The vast majority of the population, with no critical sense and believing in the institutions, obeyed. One or two looked up, saw and concluded: " they are lying to us". 

The slogan was a response to the scientist who discovered the comet. She was ridiculed in the form of memes and called crazy. Tired of being ignored, she called on people to look up, so that everyone could see with their own eyes the planet-destroying comet coming.

Defeated, in the final scene, at the dinner table, were the scientists who tried to warn everyone. They were persecuted, arrested, censored, ignored, and thrown out. The meteor had already hit the Pacific Ocean near Chile. It was a matter of minutes before it was all over. The electric power was already intermittent, giving the mood of what was to come. Some earth tremors were already occurring. The scientists were talking about life and waiting for Armageddon. They were not even curious to go to the windows to watch the end. The world outside was being destroyed. There was nothing more to do.

In the same week of the film's release, there was a public hearing promoted by Conitec - the National Commission for the Incorporation of Technologies into the Brazilian Public Health System, an agency linked to the Brazilian Ministry of Health. Conitec makes recommendations for treatments to the Brazilian public health system. And with positive recommendations, medicines are made available free of charge at public hospitals and health clinics, entities focused mainly on assisting the needy. 

I, watching the hearing, could not avoid making a parallel between the movie I had just seen and the present times. In the movie, news such as the impact of a comet was handled as scientific curiosities on a celebrity gossip show. In the story, the end of the world was shown as something not to be paid attention to or taken seriously.

At the public hearing, a doctor from the northeast of Brazil, Dr. Anastácio Queiroz, infectologist and professor of medicine at the UFC - Federal University of Ceará, came in.  He had something important to say, but it went unnoticed by everyone. Dr Anastácio informed that he treated 700 COVID patients and there were no deaths. Zero. No one died. 

In the movie, the character played by Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Dibiasky, the scientist who discovered the comet, explodes with rage on the television show. It served only to be labeled as crazy and to be turned into a meme on the Internet. Dr Anastácio, with his zero COVID deaths, confronting what others were saying in the public hearing, asked: "am I going crazy? I use everything that they are saying is not to be used". The video had a little over three thousand views.

Treating 700 patients, no one dies - or transforming deaths into a rare event - is common among doctors who treat "with everything they are told is not to be used," as Dr Queiroz says. In the USA, Dr Brian Procter treated 489 COVID patients and had only one death. Dr Brian Tyson and Dr George Fareed treated 7,000 patients and had no losses. In the movie, when the scientists were arrested, they put hoods on them. In real life, Dr Tyson had his twitter account suspended.

This is a dark portrait of real life actuality: all scientists who bring good news about treatments are canceled. This happened even to Nobel Prize winner Satoshi Omura. He had his YouTube video censored. Omura was talking about his study with ivermectin against COVID.

That's right. A Nobel Prize winner, not just any doctor on the corner, was censored when talking about his peer-reviewed study published in the prestigious scientific journal The Japanese Journal of Antibiotics. Dr Flavio Cadegiani, a Brazilian physician and scientist, treated 2500 patients without any deaths. In the movie, scientists are arrested. Dr Flavio is accused of crimes against humanity by the senate of Brazil. 

And these staggering numbers are repeated in many places around the world. In South Africa, Dr. Shankara Chetty has treated 8,000 patients with zero deaths. In fact, all treating doctors reach similar results. It is the most basic scientific proof of all, the one you learned in school as a child: when you reproduce the experiment and get the same result.

But back to the dining room scene. I had the opportunity to sit at a table with several doctors who treat COVID. Scores of results? Two hundred patients and no deaths. Three hundred and zero deaths. Six hundred, seven hundred and only one death. One thousand patients and no deaths, another with 1500 and only three deaths. That's the normal.

Among the rare deaths, there’s something in common: patients who came too late because TV commentators say all the time, hijacking the prestige of science, that treatments are proven ineffective.

At this table, I felt like I was in the scene from the movie. The world outside is ending with crowded hospitals, people intubated without being able to breathe, burials in full swing, and they are there, with the recipe on how to end the pandemic, ignored, attacked, persecuted and hooded. Outside that table, the people remain anesthetized. No reporter has gone after Dr Anastácio to amplify his voice, to talk about his results.

And it really can't be reported. With these numbers, no narrative of lack of treatment recommendations by bureaucrats can be sustained.  No position against treatments by medical societies that have their congresses sponsored by vaccine manufacturers can stand up. These numbers are the comet that no one should look at.

But there is a difference. In the movie, the scientists die together with everyone else at the end of the movie. At the table I was at, all the doctors were sad, but peaceful. They had saved themselves, their patients, friends and relatives. But the looks of despondency are the same as in the movie. Just like in the movie, while the world was collapsing, the talk was different: about life, about anything.

At the same time in Brazil, in a complete script reversal, a media biologist found herself in the character of the scientist who discovers the comet and gets angry on television. Only because the biologist eloquently asked everyone to wear masks. However, she was not indicted, defamed, persecuted, censored, or hooded. Quite the contrary. She was given space in the newspapers, in interviews, and on the television news. Moreover, everyone adhered to what she asked for. Her main journalistic quality? Being a mere translator of official decisions of the WHO, which has 50% of its budget financed by vaccine manufacturers, and religiously repeating the positions of the FDA, which also has 50% of its budget coming from big industries. Besides accusing doctors who treat COVID with cheap, generic and off-patent drugs.

That is, without ever questioning official decisions, she has the role of a mass media in the film, not a scientist. For someone to call himself Dibiasky, he must at least have discovered something. Otherwise, it is mere pretensiosity and delirium of greatness.

The day after the hearing, in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, a news article asking not to look: "Health Ministry gives space to defenders of chloroquine in public hearing".

At the hearing, Dr Regis Andriolo, professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Pará, with a long history in medicine, including doing systematic reviews for Cochrane, asked for treatment recommendation in the public health system showing a meta-analysis of hydroxychloroquine, where outpatient, early studies clearly tend in favor of HCQ. In the Folha news, he was classified as a "denialist professional". Simple as that.

"The day they will find out that I am defending science they will be ashamed. In five or ten years," Andriolo commented to me, for almost nobody to hear.

In the end, only one thing was certain: almost nobody understood the movie.