This paper focused on the success and failure of the state's preventive measures against COVID-19 by collaborating Foucault's governmentality and discipline, and Scott's study underlining the local context. This research paid attention to Vietnam and the Philippines presented conflicting situations, although the two countries have similar conditions such as population, economic level, and medical resources. An analytical method is a difference(disagreement) and contextual comparison. It compared and analyzed the states' discipline, the functional inversion of the disciplines, and the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms by examining Vietnam and the Philippines' reaction to COVID-19. The result of the analysis is as follows. Vietnam government delivered a message to unite the people with the so-called discipline. The leader and the department of Health rigorously considered COVID-19 and defined the epidemic situation as an enemy to take preventive measures in Vietnam. Through it, the people could identify epidemic surround the same as the war and successfully transferred the discipline to interiorization with the state's message. In short, Vietnam government enabled comprehensive contact-tracing and diagnostic tests for COVID-19 based on an interaction between the state and the people. Fianlly, Vietnam's discipline, the functional inversion, and the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms led to successful of disease prevention. On the other hand, the Philippines set up systematic arrangements for the preventive measures against COVID-19, but implementing policies were not preemptive, and the state's messages were not interiorized among the people. In particular, the reactive mechanism for COVID-19 was inappropriate to the Philippines' context. Therefore, the interaction between the state and the people did not occur. Put differently, the disciplinary mechanisms and the functional inversion of the disciplines were discrepant, and could not provoke the social expansion of the disciplines. As a result, the Philippines' preventive measures were ineffective. In terms of public health and medical perspectives, the high rate of diagnosis tests, rigorous quarantine, and lockdown could positively affect preventive measures. However, all good policies do not bring about a good result because all states have different social contexts, mobilizing resources, and the state capacity. Therefore, this paper underlined that the state's mechanism indispensable runs delicately under the unprecedented pandemic, and the mechanism's performance depends on the functional inversion of the disciplines and its expansion with the interaction between the state and the people.