Barren streets, vacant offices and empty gyms. A quarantined small California town of 2,600, guarded by military officials. Rationing medical care. Government turf wars and bureaucratic battles.
All of these scenes unfolded on the screen before me—not on cable news television—but in a generation’s worth of Hollywood blockbusters and a six-part miniseries about viral epidemics.
On the first weekend of our national emergency, I self-quarantined inside my apartment. I socially distanced from hundreds of St. Patrick’s Day revelers who crowded inside a white party tent and listened to a blaring Bon Jovi cover band outside the Irish pub across the street below. Then, I binge-watched nearly 10 hours of virus entertainment, from 1995’s “Outbreak” to 2019’s “The Hot Zone.”
While I didn’t emerge as a postdoc epidemiologist, the lessons I took away, hidden in plain sight all these years, would be valuable to any member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. It’s all there, from Contagion’s advocacy for social distancing to Outbreak’s and Hot Zone’s depictions of how interagency squabbling can slow responses. Even the epigraph of “Outbreak,” from the Nobel laureate and bacteriologist Joshua Lederberg, should have focused us on the gravity of a pandemic earlier: “The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus.”
But I also noticed something else: These films have perhaps numbed us to those very viruses that threaten us most—the viruses that do not have a giant fatality rate or change our physical appearance. In “Outbreak,” Dustin Hoffman’s Col. Sam Daniels, a virologist with the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, contends with Motaba, a fever-inducing virus that kills 100 percent of its patients in two to three days. In “The Hot Zone,” Ebola leaves its patients with a rash and kills them quickly. In “Contagion,” MEV-1 has a mortality rate around 20 percent. If Motaba had hit the U.S. the government would have been faster to quarantine cities and issue shelter-in-place orders, shutting down schools and non-essential businesses. Had Ebola been spreading around Indianapolis, I bet those revelers across the street would have stayed at home. But my neighbors seemed blind to COVID-19, which is more insidious and subtly dangerous than the diseases from the movies. Its mortality rate is in the single digits —low enough so many think they have little to fear—but it is proving just as disabling to the economy and our way of life, if not more, than much more deadly outbreaks, which can be contained faster.
Earlier this week, I asked Dr. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist, why all of these movies hadn’t moved politicians and voters to take viral epidemics more seriously. “I don’t think movies change the way people feel about things,” he told me, adding that he was working with the writer of “Contagion,” Scott Z. Burns, on a public awareness campaign ad on the novel coronavirus.
“The fact that the United States has dodged the bullet with all of the latest infectious diseases, my perception of our government is that unless it’s screaming hot in the headlines, nothing will be done,” says Tracey McNamara, a technical consultant on “Contagion” and a veterinary medicine professor at Western University of Health Services, told me.
“Contagion,” hints at our lackadaisical approach to any virus that isn’t produced in a Hollywood studio: There’s a scene in which a reporter asks Centers of Disease Control and Prevention Administrator Dr. Ellis Cheever, played by Laurence Fishburne, whether the government is overreacting to a virus that would claim 26 million lives in 29 days.
“Dr. Cheever, are you concerned that the CDC faces a credibility issue here, after the perceived overreaction to H1N1?” the reporter asks.
“I’d rather the news story be that we overreacted than that many people lost their lives because we didn’t do enough,” Cheever replies.
Set pieces and dramatic press conference scenes like this one seemed a critical part of any disaster movie. Now, we see them almost everyday when the coronavirus task force briefs the nation. For decades, these films have thrilled theatergoers with an invisible enemy, the stark reality of an apocalyptic human-versus-nature, us-versus-it conflict. But the actual conflict in all of these films is actually something different: It’s us versus the bureaucracy. These are not so much films about disasters as they are films about government.
“Contagion is such a compelling film—life is unfolding very much like the movie,” says McNamara, who discovered West Nile Virus in the summer of 1999 while working as the chief pathologist at the Bronx Zoo, when crows started falling from the sky and into exhibits that August. “The speed with which it spread. How it spread.”
Turns out, Hollywood has been offering Washington clues about how a pandemic might transpire for decades—and what the government should do to fight it. Here are just a few:
Avoid interagency, internecine fighting and turf battles—and streamline bureaucracies.
Much of “Outbreak” revolves around the efforts of the protagonist (Col. Sam Daniels, played by Dustin Hoffman) to convince his boss, Brigadier General William Ford (played by Morgan Freeman) that the country faces a real threat from the fictional Motaba virus. Daniels spends much of the film battling with Army General Donald McClintock, played by Donald Sutherland, to get the word out about the dangers of the virus.
After Daniels’ ex-wife, CDC staffer Dr. Roberta “Robby” Keough—played by Rene Russo—treats a dying and infected patient, she laments not getting a CDC advisory out about the virus faster. The CDC staffers’ efforts were blocked by her superiors. “I should’ve forced the alert,” the doctor says, explaining Motaba’s deadly effects. “Christ, Sam. I opened this guy up,” she tells her ex. “Looked like a bomb went off inside. His pancreas, liver, kidney, spleen—all the organs were liquified. Christ, I should’ve forced the alert.”
In “Contagion,” weeks into the outbreak of MEV-1, Dr. Sanjay Gupta (played by himself) asks CDC Administrator Cheever how many people have died from the disease during a cable television appearance. The answer, Cheever admits, was “very difficult” to know exact numbers because reporting varied by state. “There are 50 different states in this country, which means there are 50 different health departments. Followed by 50 different protocols.”
And in the final episode of “The Hot Zone,” a dispute between an Ebola researcher and the head of the CDC almost derails efforts to get to the bottom of the Reston, Virginia, Ebola outbreak.
“The guy hates my guts,” Walter said of the CDC official Trevor Rhodes (James D’Arcy). “I’m never going to convince him to help.”
“You need to bury whatever happened between you two, Carter. You got no choice.”
The messages of all these films—infighting and turf battles make things worse—felt apt for the ongoing feud between Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is a branch of HHS that operates independently. “A series of incidents over the past 120 days suggest basic communication and coordination between CMS and HHS is lacking, thereby jeopardizing HHS’ mission and undermining public trust,” HHS chief information officer Jose Arrieta wrote a recent memo.
The latest incident? On February 23, HHS’ email system crashed, causing vital messages about the emergency coronavirus funding package to be delayed for up to 11 hours. The cause: Verma’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had failed to brief HHS leaders about a test that would send thousands of messages through the system. The outage slowed the administration’s response to the deadly outbreak.
A sense of urgency matters.
In the six-part National Geographic mini-series “The Hot Zone,” based on the 1994 non-fiction book by Richard Preston, Wade Carter, a fictionalized reclusive Ebola expert who studied the virus in the field, is frustrated that more senior officials aren’t taking the threat of Ebola on American soil more seriously. Carter tells Army Col. Nancy Jaax (played by Julianna Margulies), a veterinarian who helped contain Ebola-infected monkeys from the Philippines: “Did I want this? Never. Now it’s here. Would it be good for the Oval Office to be pissing its pants about this now? You bet.”
But by the end of the series, after the scientists ultimately contained an Ebola outbreak in Reston, Virginia, there seems to be little appetite from public policymakers to take the threat of an epidemic seriously. We see a flyover shot of Capitol Hill. In a nameless committee room, the deputy secretary of the National Institutes of Health asks Jaax: “So no one died?”
“That’s correct, Mr. Chairman,” Jaax says. “But four people tested positive for the Ebola virus.
“And 172 people were tested and came up negative,” the deputy secretary responded,
unperturbed.
The warning was clear: When scientists are worried, people should listen. And yet, not more than a week ago, President Donald Trump and some Republican members of Congress, along with conservative television hosts, were saying that journalists and Democrats were overplaying the threat of the coronavirus. Now some of those pols who thought it was no big deal are getting tested for COVID-19 themselves.
The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention needs more funding, not less.
In “The Hot Zone,” Jaax’s husband, Noah Emmerich’s Lt. Col. Jerry Jaax, makes a plea: “It’s no secret the CDC needs more funding for research and development”—meaning that the CDC was caught somewhat flat-footed by the outbreak in Reston.
But back in real life, just last week, even as coronavirus was spreading in the United States, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought defended the Trump administration’s proposed $35 million cut to the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund, designed for use by the CDC.
Rep. Matt Cartwright, the Democratic member from Pennsylvania, bristled at the cuts in a hearing with Vought. “The question is today, as we sit here and we know about coronavirus and the impact it’s taking on the people of the world and the economies of the world and the stock market and everything, as you sit here today, are you ready to take that back?”
Let the scientists do the public messaging.
In none of the virus movies I watched do we see the U.S. president. He or she is often one of the least important characters. In “Contagion,” he’s moved underground. In “Outbreak,” we only see the chief of staff, talking White House officials through the ethics of bombing a California town, executing all of its citizens in order to contain Mataba. Instead, the most important characters—the ones who do the talking—are the public health officials, virologists, researchers and frontline healthcare workers. In the movies, scientists always offer a clear explanation and as much information as they have to concerned citizens. Politicians would only get in the way.
President Donald Trump didn’t get the memo. His statements about coronavirus have been perplexing and counterproductive. He said we have it “under control.” He compared it to the flu. He told people with the virus to go to work. He suggested the virus would “disappear.” Then he declared a national emergency.
In contrast, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Deborah Birx, a global health official at the State Department who is now White House coronavirus response coordinator, are lucid, calm presenters of information—perhaps the administration’s most credible spokespeople. If this were a Hollywood movie, those two would have been doing most of the talking from the beginning.
Find ways for congress to work remotely in a crisis.
Bryan Cranston, who plays Rear Admiral Lyle Haggerty in “Contagion,” alludes to a congressman who is at risk of infecting his fellow members of Congress with MEV-1. “There’s a sick congressman from Illinois in D.C.,” Haggerty says. “He was in Chicago over the holiday. They are using the pod to fly him home, and then they are closing Midway and O’Hare. The governor there is calling out the national guard. They are setting up roadblocks. They are shutting down the board of trade, public transportation. Even the Teamsters are pulling their drivers off the road.”
Any policymaker who watched that scene and connected the dots wouldn’t have been able to escape the realization that in the event of a pandemic, it would be important for Congress to have a way of working remotely. This week, several representatives and senators directed some staffers to work from home. Still, members of Congress, many of whom are at risk of higher mortality rates given their average age—57.8 years in the House and 61.8 years in the Senate— don’t have an established way to conduct their business remotely.
Practice social distancing.
The Wolfgang Petersen film “Outbreak” is perhaps the least subtle of the group of films. A lab clinician infected with Motaba sees a movie with his girlfriend. As a result, the entire town of Cedar Creek, California—population 2,600—is nearly bombed with the “the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in our arsenal” by the U.S. government to contain the spread of the virus.
When Daniels and Keough survey the infected at a makeshift hospital in Cedar Creek, Keough remarks: “So many—so fast.”
“Apparently they all gathered at a movie theater,” Daniels replies.
In “Contagion,” the CDC administrator urges social distancing and not shaking hands as the best advice for controlling the spread of MEV-1. We see empty gyms and open-floor plan offices. “Right now, our best defense has been social distancing,” Fishburne’s Cheever, the CDC director, tells Dr. Sanjay Gutpa in a cable television studio. “No handshaking. Staying home when you are sick. Washing your hands frequently.”
The idea for the scene came from Lipkin, the Columbia University epidemiologist who told the film’s writer, Scott Z. Burns, that he would serve as a technical adviser on the movie if he agreed to make it as scientifically accurate a film as possible.
In the film’s emotional denouement, Cheever visits the home of one the CDC’s janitors to deliver a vaccine, where he explains to the janitor’s son the origins of the handshake. (The scene was “designed” to disclose the history of the handshake,” Lipkin told me in an interview earlier this week.)
“Do you know where this comes from? Shaking hands?” he asks the boy, after delivering the vaccine by pushing a swab up his nostril. “It was a way of showing a stranger you weren’t carrying a weapon in the old days.”
These days, we are all presumed to be armed and dangerous.
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