COVID-19, Contagion, and Vaccine Optimism

"Building on [a] well-established foundation of skepticism, opposition to a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine hardened long before one emerged as a viable candidate, a position that will only become more intractable over time unless a meaningful public conversation can take place."

Conversations on social media centring on pandemics, vaccines, and personal rights often feed off popular culture and are driven by celebrities and so-called influencers whose arguments play on the emotions of parents and caregivers while fostering mistrust in the vaccine industry. Meanwhile, films like Steven Soderbergh's United States (US) film Contagion (2011) reinforce vaccine optimism through the assumption that a pandemic will awaken all of us to the urgency of vaccination, persuading us to put aside our reservations and anxieties. This article explores how pro-vaccination cultural products such as Contagion might actually undermine public health efforts by promoting a false narrative that simplifies the kind of vaccination campaign necessary for herd immunity to develop. There is, as the author points out, a heightened complexity of vaccine hesitancy in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Analysing Contagion in part through references to literature such as Paula Treichler's book How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, Kelly McGuire discusses the film's "almost Manichean approach to the ethics of public health response. Hence, the stock figure of the superspreader becomes a Typhoid Mary of sorts, with the standard immune figure playing a hero (as do public health doctors), while the vaccine itself acquires a transcendent status....[T]he vaccine is the true hero of the contemporary outbreak narrative, and in the case of Contagion, it is continually aligned with sacrifice....In repeatedly making of the vaccine a gift, the film underscores collective responsibility while affirming the heroism of individuals....The sacrificial logic of vaccination transcends gender categories, as men and women alike embrace their responsibility to society's most marginalized in ways that cut across national, ethnic, and class boundaries."

Continuing, McGuire explains: "In foregrounding the sacrificial, the film rejects the culture of individualism that drives anti-vaccination movements and models an ethos of care in its place. In this regard, the film seeds ideas in the public imagination that may in fact be conducive to public health. However, this ethos is itself highly contingent on a successful vaccination campaign, which, given our current climate of vaccine hesitancy, one should certainly not take for granted. In the end, the contemporary outbreak narrative conditions us to see the vaccine as the inevitable resolution of a pandemic. The reality of a sizeable segment of the population opting out of vaccination and thus thwarting public health efforts is not considered in the interest of closure. But what if there is no closure? What if, rather than a single outlier neutralized by his duplicity, hesitancy remains pervasive? What if vaccine optimism is itself an illusion, fed by cultural products like Contagion, that prevent us from preparing adequately for a very different climate once a vaccine becomes available?"

Ultimately, McGuire argues, "the film's didactic message coalesces around an ethic of sacrifice that sidesteps the politics at work in the American scene in particular, eliding the debate over agency and individual autonomy becoming more prominent as the COVID-19 pandemic continues....In these unusual times, the humanities as a discipline...has a significant role to play in conversations around vaccine hesitancy in the coming months or years as public health organizations address the formidable challenges to fostering confidence in a COVID-19 vaccine..."

McGuire suggests that "COVID-19 invites us to imagine a sequel to Contagion in which a thwarted vaccine campaign has allowed the virus to become endemic, flaring up at intervals in pockets of the global population. This would perhaps resonate more closely with reality and possibly serve as a warning to the vaccine hesitant although communications experts disagree on whether optimistic or negative messaging is most effective in promoting public health objectives. However, in this instance [Contagion], a story of virus containment affords reassurance at the price of the real. This is not to say that a film has any responsibility to do anything less or more than this, but from a public health perspective, it may dilute some of the urgency of a pandemic by pushing a narrative of vaccine determinism."

In conclusion: "As COVID-19 compels us to examine anew fictional products of popular culture that shape our understanding of public health, one important fact remains certain: we must be wary of how our assumptions about the arc of this and future pandemics are informed by the typical determinism of the virus thrillers we consume."