Acclaimed film-maker David France’s How to Survive a Pandemic on HBO documents ‘a scientific undertaking unlike any in our lifetime’
How to Survive a Pandemic, investigative journalist and director David France’s documentary on the road to developing, producing and inequitably distributing several Covid-19 vaccines, begins on the day vaccines went from murky future to clear horizon. The film opens in December 2020, in the remarkably bespoke basement of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Dr Peter Marks. The room is decked in Mardi Gras beads and a teddy bear; Marks’s clunky work laptop is surrounded by cans of oats. On camera and on the phone with Gen Gustave Perna, the chief operating officer of the federal Covid-19 response for vaccine and therapeutics, Marks celebrates the FDA’s emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. “Sorry you had to deal with all that political crap,” says Perna. “Vaccines will be moving tomorrow.”
The moment is an undeniable achievement of modern science despite significant political headwinds in the US and, as France’s film deftly argues, an opportunity to empower public health largely squandered by national self-interest. By 2022, there are now several documentaries tackling some slice of the pandemic: Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control, on the Trump administration’s costly botching of the early pandemic response in the US; Nanfu Wang’s similarly damning In the Same Breath, on the US and China’s mishandling of the virus; Matthew Heineman’s grueling The First Wave, on the devastating initial pandemic in New York. France’s film has its fair share of devastation and tragic Covid iconography – ambulances, ventilators, footage of mass burials. But is trained in particular on the sprint, from the moment the virus was sequenced, to develop a public health bulwark of vaccines: when they would be available, who would make them, how they would be distributed, how much the political chaos of the Trump administration would corrode the scientific process.
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