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Virulent: The Vaccine War (48 min)

(Note: an 87 minute version of the film is also available)


VIRULENT: The Vaccine War explores the highly contentious, emotionally fraught firestorm surrounding vaccines, charting the collision between scientists and charlatans, truth and lies.

The filmmakers were on the homestretch of a documentary about vaccine hesitancy, which the World Health Organization had called one of the top ten threats to global health, when COVID-19 struck. The pandemic upended the world and spun the film into uncharted territory.

The vaccine controversy continues to cut across political, cultural, racial and socio-economic lines, engulfing doctors and patients as well as conspiracy theorists, opportunists looking to cash in and celebrities.

Public health experts’ worries that the coronavirus vaccine could create fear of all vaccines appear to have been borne out by the resurgence of previously eradicated childhood diseases including measles and pertussis. Doctors admit that they have not learned how to effectively communicate science to their patients, leaving them susceptible to social media which is expertly manipulated, always pushing toward the extremes, knocking facts aside and never flinching at the terrible cost in suffering these posts inflict.

VIRULENT looks at the ways in which minorities are targeted by anti-vaccine misinformation. This is especially true of Black communities which have paid a cruel and punishing price. Black Americans who contract COVID are one-and-a-half times likelier to die and five times likelier to be hospitalized than their white counterparts. The film examines the “Tuskegee Effect,” the collective memory of a notorious 40-year experiment in which 600 Black sharecroppers infected with syphilis received placebos rather than penicillin, and efforts by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the most prominent anti-vaccine activist, to disseminate bad science to African Americans who still hold his father in high esteem and have reason to distrust government and the medical establishment.

The film also tells the captivating tale of our country at its best, when Americans rolled up their sleeves and worked together to help Dr. Jonas Salk and the March of Dimes defeat polio, the most feared disease of the 20th century.

Taking us deep into these opposing worlds are Dr. Paul Offit, one of the world’s preeminent virologists and the project’s medical advisor; Dr. Peter Salk, Jonas Salk’s physician son; Arthur Caplan, PhD, who founded NYU’s Division of Bioethics and has written extensively about vaccines; New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, who writes about how bad science spreads online; NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny, who has exposed how anti-vaxxers target grieving parents and has herself become a target; high school senior Ethan Lindenberger, who made headlines when he had himself vaccinated against his parents’ wishes; and former vaccine skeptics including those who lost children to vaccine-preventable illnesses.

VIRULENT: The Vaccine War is an invitation to think again, exposing the myths and laying bare the facts about vaccine science, its history and what it will take to eradicate the world’s most deadly diseases.

Distributor: Bullfrog Films

Length: 48 minutes

Date: 2024

Genre: Expository

Language: English

Grade: 9-12, College, Adults

Color/BW:  Color / Black and White

Closed Captioning: Available

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