While winter turned to spring at the beginning of 2020, Laura Davis and Tjardus Greidanus worked on a film on vaccines. They focused on the increasingly politicized debate around them, in particular in California, and explored how the laws were tightened after a notorious measles epidemic in Disneyland in 2014, despite certain protests and the opposition organized.
“Wait a minute, measles was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000, when it happens?” Davis, based in Los Angeles, said in an interview with The Bay Area News Group. They started talking to experts: “Trying to paint a painting for our viewers of what a pandemic looks like,” she said. “Then maybe two months after starting the film, Covid Hits.”
The novel Coronavirus would have deep effects on the film, the global conversation around vaccines and the larger world.
While the revolutionary mRNA vaccine is under development, in “Warp Speed”, the filmmakers have adjusted their angle. “Now we are not talking about Ebola or something that has happened in Asia, we are talking about something that sweeps our country.”
Covid would lead to more than 800,000 deaths across the country in the first two years.
The deployment of a COVVI-19 vaccine at the end of 2020 and at the beginning of 2021 marked at least one symbolic end to the most extreme pandemic precautions, such as school closings and home work orders, allowing those who are most at risk a certain protection in the middle of the continuous general community transmission of the virus.
But the cocvid vaccine would also bring a renewed public debate on vaccines. “Unfortunately, the anti-Vaccin community began to coopte the pandemic and began to run conspiracy theories,” said Dr. Toudd Wolynn, a pediatrician based in Pennsylvania interviewed in the film.
The message of the film, Virulent: the war of vaccination, is more important now than when they started working there, Davis believes. Although the cocvid vaccine has proven to be effective in reducing serious illnesses, hospitalization and deaths, vaccine mandates have not been well received by many and vaccination skepticism has increased.
One of the experts interviewed in the film had a premonitory prediction, according to which skepticism and fear of the cocvid vaccine would create the fear of all vaccines. “I said, I hope you are wrong,” recalls Davis. “But he was right.”
Now, fewer people receive the annual vaccine covids that during the first two years it was available, and vaccination rates for other infectious diseases have also dropped in recent years. Infantile vaccinations have been delayed during pandemic stops and overall progress on vaccination rates for measles in California have been blocked.
This year saw the first deaths of the country’s measles in more than a decade; Two non -vaccinated children died in the middle of a large epidemic in Texas.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now the country’s health secretary and, at his first press conference, announced his intention to seek the “origins” of the “epidemic” of autism, which, according to him, now affects 1 in 31 children. Autism and infant vaccinations have long been falsely associated, in particular by the defense of non -profit children Kennedy, the defense of children. And Kennedy’s comments on people with autism never paying taxes or playing baseball were widespread.
Kennedy was interviewed for the film and did not retain his opinions, said Davis. Kennedy has had many quotes, she is sad, but some of the research he cited did not support the conclusions he claimed to have made.
The filmmakers have gone beyond celebrities and experts, also speaking to ordinary people, including certain residents of the bay region, their own hesitation, and how their opinions have changed or not.
“We go down hard people who make the bank,” said Davis about those who take advantage of the fear of catching up with vaccine safety, “but we adopt a very friendly approach, an empathetic approach” for ordinary people who are just afraid. Davis said that many people were worried that the vaccine is not “natural”. “We are very entering the film a lot … But the disease is natural, you know?” So nature is not automatically better. ”
The filmmakers were surprised and grateful that PBS chose to distribute the film in the middle of the political and public health climate of the second administration of Trumps. PBS puts the system available to anyone online.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
