As winter turned to spring in early 2020, Laura Davis and Tjardus Greidanus were working on a film about vaccines. They were focused on the increasingly politicized debate around them, especially in California, and explored how laws were tightened after a notorious measles outbreak at Disneyland in 2014, despite some protests and organized opposition.
“Wait a minute, measles was declared eradicated in the United States in the year 2000, so what is going on?” Davis, based in Los Angeles, said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group. They started talking to experts, “trying to paint a picture for our viewers of what a pandemic looks like,” she said. “Then maybe two months after we started the film, COVID hits.”
The novel coronavirus would have profound effects on the film, the global conversation around vaccines and the greater world.
As the ground-breaking mRNA COVID vaccine was being developed, at “warp speed,” the filmmakers adjusted their angle. “Now we’re not talking about Ebola or something that happened in Asia, we’re talking about something that is sweeping our country.”
COVID would result in over 800,000 deaths around the country in the first two years.
The roll-out of a COVID-19 vaccine in late 2020 and early 2021 marked at least a symbolic end to the most extreme pandemic precautions, like school closures and work-from-home orders, allowing those most at risk some protection amid continued widespread community transmission of the virus.
But the COVID vaccine would also bring a renewed public debate around vaccines. “Sadly, the anti-vaccine community began to co-opt the pandemic and started spinning conspiracy theories,” said Dr. Todd Wolynn, a Pennsylvania-based pediatrician interviewed in the film.
The message of the film, Virulent: The Vaccine War, is more important now than when they first started working on it, Davis believes. While the COVID vaccine proved effective at lowering serious illness, hospitalization and deaths, vaccine mandates were not received well by many, and vaccine skepticism grew.
One of the experts interviewed in the film had a prescient prediction, that skepticism and fear of the COVID vaccine would create fear of all vaccines. “I said, I hope you’re wrong,” Davis recalls. “But he was right.”
Now, fewer people are getting the annual COVID vaccine than in the first two years it was available, and vaccination rates for other infectious diseases have also dropped in the past few years. Childhood vaccinations were delayed during pandemic shutdowns and overall progress on vaccination rates for measles in California was stalled.
This year saw the country’s first measles deaths in over a decade; two unvaccinated children died amid a large outbreak in Texas.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the nation’s health secretary now, and in his first press conference announced his intentions to to research “the origins” of the “epidemic” of autism, which he said now affects 1 in 31 children. Autism and childhood vaccinations have long been falsely associated, including by the non-profit Kennedy founded, Children’s Health Defense. And Kennedy’s comments about those with autism never paying taxes or playing baseball have been met with widespread criticism.
Kennedy was interviewed for the film, and did not hold back his opinions, Davis said. Kennedy had many citations, she sad, but some of the research he cited did not back up the conclusions he claimed they did.
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“We come down hard on the people that are making bank,” Davis said of those who are profiting off of stoking fears about vaccine safety, “but we take a very sympathetic approach, an empathetic approach” to the regular people who are just afraid. Davis said many people worry about the vaccine not being “natural.” “We get into that a lot in the film… but disease is natural, you know? So nature is not automatically better.”
The filmmakers were surprised and grateful that PBS chose to distribute the film amid the political and public health climate of Trumps’ second administration. PBS is making the available for anyone to watch online.
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