Conversations: David France
SYNOPSIS
Emily speaks with documentary filmmaker and journalist David France about his films How to Survive a Pandemic (2022) and How to Survive a Plague (2012), and the role of storytelling in documenting public health crises and holding institutions accountable.
LISTEN
GUEST
David France is an award-winning filmmaker, investigative journalist and a bestselling author. His directorial debut, How to Survive a Plague, received Academy and Emmy nominations and a Peabody Award. His film, The Death & Life of Marsha P. Johnson, was awarded the Outfest “Freedom Award”. Welcome to Chechnya received numerous awards, including BAFTA and Peabody. David's latest and fourth directed film, How to Survive a Pandemic (HBO Max, 2022), premiered at 2022 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and was also screened at 2022 CPH:DOX.
CREDITS
Hosted by Emily Silverman.
Produced by Emily Silverman and Sam Osborn.
Edited and mixed by Sam Osborn.
Assistant Produced by Carly Besser.
Original theme music by Yosef Munro. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, and people like you who have donated through our website and Patreon page.
TRANSCRIPT
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The Nocturnists: Conversations
Emily in Conversation with David France
Episode Transcript
Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.
Emily Silverman
You're listening to The Nocturnists: Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. History is always happening. We wake up; we read the news. We're living in history. But lately, the sense of living in history has felt more acute. We're living in a time of political up-heaval, social up-heaval, biomedical up-heaval, and much of this has to do with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which radically altered our way of being. Here at The Nocturnists, we specialize in stories from the world of medicine, and so we felt called to document the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare workers. Today's guest felt a similar impulse to document COVID-19.
David France is an award-winning filmmaker, investigative journalist, and best-selling author. His directorial debut How to Survive a Plague (which is about the HIV/AIDS crisis and the rise of ACT UP and Citizen Science) received Academy and Emmy nominations as well as a Peabody Award. His film The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson was awarded the Outfest "Freedom Award". His film Welcome to Chechnya received numerous awards, including a BAFTA and a Peabody, and his latest and fourth directed film, How to Survive a Pandemic, which focuses on the United States' effort to develop and distribute the COVID vaccine, premiered at the 2022 Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival. I really enjoyed my conversation with David, in which we talked about the opportunities and limitations of non-fiction storytelling, the importance of trust and relationships when documenting history as it unfolds in real-time, the similarities and differences between his AIDS film and his COVID film and the different ways that he conceives of himself as a reporter, a filmmaker, an artist. Before we move on, I want to play a brief audio clip from his 2022 film, How to Survive a Pandemic. Here's the clip.
Jon Cohen
Why do you think it is that there are so few world leaders who are willing to say, "I'm going to be blunt, and call this a catastrophic moral failure? I'm going to say it is grotesque to have a gap between a 12-year-old being vaccinated—" (and you never say in the United States, but I can fill in the blank. I live there.) "We must do more," they say... but they don't call it what it is. Why? Why not?
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesuys
I mean, that's the question I wanted an answer for, actually. Because a shared responsibility is just something you would expect from a decent human being. When the whole world is burning, it's about humanity.
Jon Cohen
I imagine you have been on the phone with leaders of vaccine companies.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesuys
I encourage them to help.
Jon Cohen
What was the reaction?
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesuys
It's the same response, the same argument. You know, it's unprecedented actually, to have a number of vaccines approved in just a year, but that still saddens me, because I know what happened in the past. And that's happening now on our watch, again, and, you know, this question comes, "When do we learn? When?"
Emily Silverman
I am sitting here with David France. David, thank you so much for being here today.
David France
Well, thanks for having me.
Emily Silverman
So, over the weekend, I watched two of your films. I watched How to Survive a Plague, which came out in 2012, and covers the ACT UP movement and the AIDS crisis. And I also watched the more recent film, How to Survive a Pandemic, which came out, I believe, this year, 2022 and is about COVID-19. I'm really looking forward to talking about the COVID film, but actually both films, if you don't mind. And I thought that maybe, to begin, you could walk me back to around March of 2020, when the pandemic first really exploded in the United States. Where were you? And when did you decide that you wanted to make another film about a disease and about a pandemic?
David France
I was in Berlin, in Germany, in February, where it became really clear that something was afoot that needed to be paid very close attention to. And by the time I got back to the US, they were already readying the lock-down orders around the country. And I didn't at first think I would be drawn into making a film about the pandemic; I was drawn into the terror of the pandemic, and all the loneliness that entailed, that was involved in the lockdown. And with my collaborators, we began having daily Zoom meetings, in which all we did was wonder what there was to know about the vaccines. And we would get more information and share it with one another. We were vaccine-focused, because we were convinced, as was much or all of the scientific community, that that was going to be our solution.
And after a while, we figured that... if we're... that we're, we're already embedded on the kind of cutting-edge of what was being done, that we might just as well, kind of bottle this interest that we had, and... And do something that we felt really responsible to do, which is to record this huge scientific undertaking—for posterity, for future generations, so that we would know, who did what? Did it succeed? What failed? And given that so much public money was involved in this, we felt that there was an obligation in return, on the part of the people who are doing the work, to let us watch. And so that was the proposal we sent out, both to ourselves, to HBO, and to the scientific community.
Emily Silverman
You say that you and your team were vaccine-focused. And that was because you felt that that was going to be central to the solution. And I'm wondering that, that feeling that vaccines were going to be important: Was that grounded in an interest in, and passion for, and belief in science and scientific achievement, and/or a pessimism around other ways of containing viruses. Like, you know, public health, contact tracing, people wielding their institutional and political power in effective ways? Or ineffective ways?
David France
Well, I think by March, it was already clear that the non-pharmaceutical interventions were, although a grand idea, not something that was going to be implemented in a broad enough way to make the kind of difference that was going to be necessary. We'd already failed on that score. We had failed to have enough masks, even for the frontline health care workers—the N95 crisis that went on for months and months at the beginning of the pandemic. So, I think it was just apparent to anybody that this was going to be a science solution. And before I started making documentary films, I was a science and health reporter. So, I've had decades of experience in the field, of trying to make sense of what the scientific process is, to a general audience.
But I was confident that, if the vaccines were successful, that was going to get us out of this trouble before anything else. So, that's why we focused on it. It's not because we had an academic interest. It's because we all wanted to roll up our sleeves; we all wanted vaccines. We all wanted to get back together and get back to the business of going to movie theaters. And it was all very, very self-interest driven.
Emily Silverman
When you decide that you want to take on a task, like documenting the development and production and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine, a task which is being undertaken by many different pharmaceutical companies and a task that has many different stakeholders, how do you go about the process of getting access to those stakeholders? Whether it's the head of the WHO, Anthony Fauci, pharmaceutical people, community leaders? How do you do that?
David France
I was lucky to have already had relationships, professional relationships, with many of those people. I've known Dr. Fauci since the mid 1980s, and have covered him, so it was easy to reach back out. I had cell phone numbers for a lot of folks. I also brought in, as you see in the film, the science journalist Jon Cohen from Science Magazine, whose relationships were even broader than mine were. Especially going into the academic labs, where the research was being conducted. And I was able to follow him in through his leads to some of those, to gain some of that trust and access.
But we made a promise to people, because they were a little hesitant with our requests to begin with, because they were engaged in work that might have, you know, for competitive reasons, that they might not want other people to know about, at least not in real-time. So, the promise that we made was that we would embargo all information that we learn, and all footage that we recorded until 2022. So—and we started in early 2020—so, that no one would see any of this footage until well after these experiments were brought to a head. And that we would maintain the silos of each of the labs and each of the pharmaceutical companies in each of the major institutions, so that anything we learned there would not leak into the rest of the work that we were doing. And it was based on that kind of strict confidentiality that we were negotiating with each of these companies, that we were invited to come in with our cameras.
There's a lot of differences between AIDS and COVID. And there's a lot of differences between your film about AIDS and your film about COVID. And one of the differences that stood out to me most was that the AIDS film was more retrospective, more in past tense, looking back, digging up archival footage, things of that nature. And the COVID film was produced prospectively or in real-time. And you just mentioned some of the challenges that came up around that—having to embargo information. But I'm wondering if you could expand a bit more about what it felt like, the difference between looking back and making a film in the moment?
It's an interesting question. You know, I was a reporter, a print reporter, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the US and abroad. I was a regular reporter covering ACT UP and AIDS activism. I am in many of those scenes in that old film. So, I did watch all of that in real-time. And it was another 15 years after the breakthroughs of 1996, that brought us the ARVs that made surviving an HIV infection probable, and likely. And in that 15-year period, there was very little journalism that was going on around HIV and its impact. So, I looked back to see what I could learn about my own journalism and my own insights from that time. And that's what produced How to Survive a Plague.
In this case, just like my early reporting, I was following it all in real time. But I wanted to follow it out a length of time to test it. So, it was... the film is not just—as you pointed out, Emily—not just about the development of the vaccines and the testing of them, the trials, but about the vaccination program itself. Like, a vaccine is only going to work if everybody gets it. And so that was our charge, then, in the film—was to measure the success against the standards and goalposts that were established by public health authorities, of the rollout in that first full year of vaccine availability. And that was, you know, certainly, we haven't had any more time than that year to look back yet. But I wanted to make sure that we were trying to find a long view on a very, very fresh piece of history.
Emily Silverman
I noticed that the film was split into two parts. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Part One was basically from the point that China released the genetic sequence of the virus, through the invention of the vaccines, to the, I guess, packaging, and they're ready to go out. And then we pivot into Part Two, which is about distribution. Was that an intentional choice to split the film into those two sections?
David France
If the challenge was, and we kept saying this to ourselves, "How will history record this?" and after we spent our nearly two years in production, we realized that it was the second half, now half of the film, that was going to really define that measurement of our successes. The vaccines are brilliant, and they were devised very quickly because of all the work that had come before. And they were pushed through Phase I, Phase II, Phase III trials: large-scale trials in an historic timeframe and it was the summit of scientific success, as one of the people in the film says. And that was a thrill to watch. And then, we just saw the rest of the world so desperate to share in that breakthrough. And the remarkable, and heartbreaking, lack of political will to make that happen. So, in the long run, I felt it did deserve half of the film to see, you know, vaccine is, is only as good as the arms that it gets into. It was meaningless to have produced those vials that we see at the end of the first half of the film, if they don't reach the people who need them the most.
Emily Silverman
In the first film, How to Survive a Plague, it definitely felt more focused on domestic cases of HIV and AIDS. We are in the bookstores and the basements and, you know, organizing spaces of the ACT UP people. There's a sense of real community and solidarity. And then with this COVID film, as you said, in the second half especially, it becomes a much more global story. And you're in Brazil, and you're in, you know, so many different places and talking about a story that is unfolding. Just, it felt kind of orders of magnitude larger, even though I understand that HIV/AIDS is also a global disease. But, I'm just wondering, like, as an artist, or as a storyteller, like, how do you wrap your arms around a story that big and that global?
David France
It was enormous. It was just massive. We knew that it was a global story. But we also didn't know where it was going to take us. So, we just started filming all across the globe. We filmed so many storylines, in so many more countries than you see in the film. Because we just didn't know... we didn't want to miss anything. We wanted to see it in real time. But we didn't know what aspects would best tell the story of this history, and would be most essential to telling that story. So, we really took this thing on, in a way that I had never tackled a project before in the past. Mostly, my films are done with crews of six or ten people. We had a full-time crew of sixteen, and then all the shooting crews from around the world that we brought in to help us. So, we were scores and scores of filmmakers on this project, wanting to make sure we didn't miss anything, that we can actually see the story and carry it forward, you know, so that history can record what happened here. And we have a ton of extra footage, as you can imagine. We're working with, like the Wellcome Trust people, our partners at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to try and find a way to make that available, in addition to the film that we put together, for historians who want to look back at this time.
Emily Silverman
One of the storylines that I found to be especially compelling was that of Paul Abernathy, a priest serving a poor community in Pittsburgh. What was it like working with Paul?
David France
He is just this incredible, charismatic figure. I don't... I think he deserves his own on-going series. There's just something so special about him. But I had been looking for activism, kind of the Citizen Science kind of activism that we saw grow in the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the plague years. And the kinds of activists that I was filming with included people who were trying to find outsider ways to reform, and help hurry along the large-scale clinical trials, people who were protesting the IP issues around the recipes for the vaccines, and then a number of people who are doing that kind of community support work that we found that Father Paul was doing in Pittsburgh. And what drew us to tell his story was his conviction, right from the beginning of the pandemic, that it was both at once horrible, and, a tremendous opportunity: an opportunity to organize the community. An opportunity to bring to light what everybody who lives there knows: which is that they're isolated, you know, in a terrible way, from the healthcare system and from the public health system. That diseases impact the poor in the US, and around the globe, at much higher rates. And, although he wasn't welcoming the repeat of that flushing out of that knowledge, he saw it as a chance to really take a globe that had been so brought to its knees by the pandemic and find a way to rebuild it around more humane ideas.
Emily Silverman
For our audience who hasn't seen the film yet, can you just paint a picture of Paul, and who he is, and the work that he does, and exactly what he's doing in the community?
David France
Paul Abernathy is an Orthodox Christian priest, who works with an organization in his town in Pittsburgh, called the Neighborhood Resilience Project. And it's a part of a small but growing national movement of communities to help address issues in the community, both of access to health care, especially access to mental health care, diagnosis, and treatment. And then when the pandemic rolled in, he organized his community—and it's an African-American community—to go door-to-door through the community. And just check in on people. Make sure people are okay in their isolation; make sure that when they went to lockdown, that they were not left without a social network and a safety net that could keep them from the worst of the ramifications of that, including food insecurity and the like.
The authorities in his city and state reached out to him, to ask him to help build a day of vaccination in his community, which we get to watch in the film. And to do that, he had to address the vaccine hesitancy that we all expected was going to be severe in communities of color, given the histories that they they share and recognize around violations of trust between the communities and health care providers, historically. We see that you can remove hesitancy by addressing it in the proper ways. And at the same time—and this was totally unexpected, for any of us, I think—we saw, instead, the people who joined the anti-vaccine movement were not from those communities that we had been worried about, but were from the white middle-class communities who had fallen into the hands of conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theorists, and political leadership that was suspect at best. And that's what created the anti-vax movement that we're still struggling with in the US, that has left only, you know, 69% of the US population fully vaccinated. So, the movement of that pendulum, we watched in real time in the film, while at the same time, we see Father Paul really creating a movement in his town that we expect to see great things from in the future.
Emily Silverman
I was so struck by these images of the AIDS protests in the first film. I knew about ACT UP, but I had never seen your film. And there was just something about watching those images that really brought it to life. And I just felt like a swell of, just, pride and inspiration as I watched these people who had been so marginalized in society, educating themselves, you know; playwrights, and film archivists, who were suddenly, like, learning medical knowledge and drug, pharmaceutical information and things like that. And you really got a sense that they weren't fighting against, they were fighting for. And then comparing that with this scene in the second film, the pandemic film, sort of this smattering of Trump supporters on the side of the road, who don't seem to be fighting for anything in particular. There's a guy wearing a hat that says, "Fuck Dr. Fauci" and the journalist is, "Why are you wearing a hat that says, 'Fuck Dr. Fauci'?" and the guy says, "Why not?" And just the lack of, like, a unified message, just was really striking to me watching the films back-to-back, and so I'm wondering how you are thinking about that contrast.
David France
It's interesting. It's the politics of chaos, right? And, even in that scene, just is so fascinating, those little moments where, then somebody from off-camera says, "She's not even a doctor." And the journalist goes, "What are you talking about?" "Jill Biden is not even a doctor." Like, where does that come from? And how do those things all add up into something so grand that it would mobilize that group of people to go out and stand on the side of the road to try to sell their world view? I, you know, I don't know, I've been as a journalist, a student of activism for most of my life, but mostly social justice activism, or as in the first film, Citizen Science activism. And I've never encountered the kind of activism that that you saw there, and that we saw storming the Capitol on January 6th. Yeah, it's a mystery to me as well.
But it's also not surprising, at least around the health care issues, because of the absolute lunacy in leadership that was coming from the White House at the dawn of the pandemic. You know, the peculiar, let's call it, scientific lack of information that the President was trying to sell at the time—that Trump was trying to sell—and the way that he worked to really encourage people to hold science in disregard, to hold any kind of expertise or data at arm's length, and to encourage instead, kind of self-conclusions. And I think that's what's empowered now—that kind of far right movement that has been still attacking Dr. Fauci. You know he's still receiving regular death threats, for being a scientist.
You know, I think that gives the rest of us a responsibility to somehow defend science, to protect science from that kind of political intervention. And that's, I guess, that third thread through the film is really the protection of science. And I think that's what we see the journalist Jon Cohen doing through the course of these two years, is to help defend science from this kind of political onslaught. And also, then to hold science to account: to say, "Look, the scientific process has to be followed." It has to be done in ways that are accessible and replicable. And we need to make sure that the science is right, so that we can safely say to everybody, "Take this vaccine."
Emily Silverman
Yeah, you really got a sense watching the film of how much Trump was pressuring the scientists to get it done, potentially, in a way that was ineffective and unsafe, that he cared more about the appearance of getting it done than about actually getting it done. And that's a very sensitive topic. You know, you mentioned that you're working with different corporations and pharmaceutical companies and having to embargo information because of market competition. But what about this other piece of having Fauci talk about Trump the way that he did? Or having... there was another person interviewed, who smiled and said there was this moment where Trump pointed at the ceiling and said, "This is an oval; we're in the Oval Office; I'm the president." And so, kind of getting people to, like, speak openly and critically about the administration. In the moment, that must have been really challenging, because their careers were at stake.
David France
Absolutely, and that gentleman was Dr. Moncef Slaoui, who was the head of Operation Warp Speed. You know, he was the person in charge of Donald Trump's massive initiative around the vaccines. You know, he's as mystified as anybody about what really went down there. And he was, just like so many of these other people we see in the film, like, personally, holding that line against that kind of insanity, because he understood the need to make sure that we know what these vaccines are, and the need to keep science and politics separated. But at the same time, they, ....they're human beings. You know, and as human beings, they want to, they wanted to and want to make sure that people know what happened. But you know, there's a scene in Pandemic where Fauci invites us into his backyard, because we still couldn't be in people's homes, when he's having a beer. And he just is talking, over the beer, about what it's like to live inside that strange bubble in Washington that he had been living inside of, and he just wanted it to be known what happened, and all we promised was that nobody would see it until 2022. And that's all they asked for, just a little bit of time.
Emily Silverman
Another thing I noticed, just reflecting on the differences between the two films and the two diseases, and the two movements, was the role of technology in COVID. And by that, I mean, of course, social isolation requiring us to interact through our laptops, and use Zoom and things like that. But also social media has become such a dominant aspect of our lives, and has driven a lot of the political division and misinformation. And when I was watching the AIDS film, it just felt so 3D. It felt so "in the flesh". It was, like, bodies in a room, you know, crowded in a room, you could feel the warmth. People, like, throwing their bodies on the ground in a church. It just felt so, I guess, body-based. And I could sense the struggles in storytelling in the modern era, where so many people are doing things through tweet, like there's a moment where the camera just zooms in on a tweet. And somebody has re-tweeted something just with the word, "Yes." Y-E-S, period. And so I'm wondering, as a storyteller, like, how do you think about telling stories about big issues these days, when so much of it happens online? It's, like, so it's kind of hard to do, right?
David France
It's a great question. But, you know, I, you know, I've lived through all those iterations, and you're right, and ACT UP... that ACT UP room in New York, every Monday night, was the Facebook of its time. People went there. And it wasn't just that, there were 147 chapters, very quickly, around the globe. And people went to those meetings, to get information. You know, that's why they went there. And then to use that information to try to get more information. So, the exchange of new findings, the strategizing about how to help cause science to move forward, all of that took place offline, you know, face-to-face.
I like to tell people that when they had settled on any of the demonstrations that they called, they would then have to activate their phone tree to let people know about it. And each person who got a call was required to then call the next 10 people on their list and those 10 had their own lists. And that network of how to get the news out, it was like the Twitter of its time, right? So, although it was slower, and more limited, it still worked. Obviously, this was... there's gonna be a lot of two dimensionality to the way information was communicated in this pandemic, and we struggled at first to try to find a way to record it because we did not want to be climbing into people's rooms and houses. So we started sending cameras around to people and asking them to turn them on and giving them instructions about where to place them. And so we were requiring a lot, at least in the first couple of months, of the subjects of the film.
We wanted to film inside those early laboratories and spent some time developing robotic cameras that we could drive, like from our homes, because everybody was at home, into laboratories. And we did convince a lab here in New York, IAVI, the International AIDS Vaccine initiative lab. (They were working on a vaccine candidate with with Merck.) We convinced them to let us do a day of shooting with this, with this robot, which was basically... it looked like an iPad on a big long neck. And one of those single wheels that rolled around. It was a disaster. Not because it, you know, derailed the Merck vaccine, thank God, but because everybody was so fascinated by, and horrified by, the presence of this robot, that all all we saw in the footage was people kind of covering their mouths. And worrying about the thing as it was, like, approaching the table, and would it hit the table? And so we backed out of that laboratory with it, and backed out of that entire undertaking. So.
Emily Silverman
As I mentioned to you earlier, we here at The Nocturnists collected hundreds of audio diaries from health care workers at the beginning of the pandemic, mostly during the months of March, April, and May of 2020. And each night, as I lay in bed with my headphones listening to these stories, I was hearing a lot of people talk about the emerging meta-narrative. So, for example, a doctor would call in and say, "I was reading the New York Times today and I saw this headline, it was all about healthcare heroes," and then they would go into this monologue about why that made them really uncomfortable and why the hero narrative didn't fit right or why, you know, the military metaphors, for example, didn't fit right. And it kind of made me wonder, like, what are we doing here as The Nocturnists? Like, are we telling a different story than the mass media? Who are we giving voices to? Are we artists? Are we podcasters? Are we historians? Are we journalists? Are we anthropologists? Like, I'm just a doctor. And so I would love to hear you answer that question. Like, how do you think about your work? And what kind of storytelling it is, and how it's different from or the same as mainstream news or mainstream narratives about vaccine development?
David France
Well, like you, I'm not a trained historian. I studied philosophy. And I think I bring a kind of a philosophical prism to the journalism that I do. But I've been a journalist for 40 years. And I've always thought that that maxim that says that journalism is the first draft of history, is true. Like, you know, I think of myself as a witness, and the work that I do as witnessing, and that's different from the work that the way a historian might describe their work. Because I don't necessarily try to look at the whole waterfront, I ask myself a question about a certain thing that's happening, and to try to tell the story that way. But I think witnessing is also a part of history, but maybe a little more personalized or individualized. Because it depends on who's doing that witnessing.
Emily Silverman
Right. Like, is it a doctor or listening to stories from doctors? Or is it a journalist collecting stories from doctors? And one thing I noticed is that doctors were willing to speak with me in a way that they weren't willing to speak with journalists, because I wasn't a journalist, because I was a doctor.
David France
Well, maybe, maybe I had some of that also with gaining the access to these labs, because as you can imagine, you know, daily, reporters were trying to get into the labs and other documentary filmmakers were trying to get into the labs. And I think that because I have this kind of long history of doing science journalism, and because How to Survive a Plague is so well-regarded, I think, by the scientific community, that they felt that the story would be faithfully told, I think.
Emily Silverman
There's a scene in your film, where a journalist is sitting with Dr. Tedros, an Ethiopian public health researcher and Director General of the WHO since 2017. And he's talking about the global failures of HIV/AIDS, and he asked the question, "When do we learn? When?" And, as somebody who made a documentary about HIV/AIDS, and is now making documentaries about COVID, I'm sure that question has come up in your mind. Like, have we really not learned in the last decade? And so I'm wondering, like, how are you thinking about that question?
David France
Well, that was one of my motivating questions, you know, frankly. How to Survive a Plague ends with the discovery of these miracle pills. And then what happened after that was a public health nightmare: that the pills were available—they're the most expensive pills ever released—and they were entirely out of reach to most people with HIV in the globe, for more than a decade, and ... for 15 years, really. And that was, you know, this great moral failure. And that's what Tedros is talking about there, that he was one of those activist-physicians and public health officials, who's trying to get antiretroviral therapy into Ethiopia, and into the rest of Africa. And just watching people die by the hundreds of thousands because of, you know, political overreach and kind of corporate inhumanity. And, in a way, I wanted to address that as a kind of a connective tissue to How to Survive a Plague. And all of the characters who are involved in the work, in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic had that experience as being physicians and researchers in the early AIDS rollout. And they all knew what a disaster that was, and they wanted to make sure that it didn't get repeated.
So, the fact that we had a plurality of officials who had as their moral imperative to succeed this time, where they had failed last time, made it seem even more heartbreaking that they weren't able to do that. And I think that scene with Dr. Tedros is really heartbreaking because his spirit is broken there. And, you know, you see it. It's a... He spent almost two years on his soapbox calling for the world to stand up, and doing it in the most heartfelt way. If eloquent speech-making could save the world, then the world would have been saved, because he had done such a phenomenal job speaking to these large issues, even before we had a vaccine, and yet he was left with no other power, no real power to do anything about it. And I think what we have to learn is what it's going to take to give that kind of power to the Dr. Tedroses of the future.
You know, from every chapter in this pandemic, we recognize that public health has been marginalized. Public health agencies have been defunded and dispirited, and shunted aside... in many instances, not even used in the pandemic, we saw that with the Trump White House. And even though they had their political hench-folks in charge of the CDC, they marginalized the CDC. And the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control was not even part of the COVID Taskforce in the White House. And the biggest of those agencies is the World Health Organization, which has absolutely no power to to coordinate the kind of ordered rollout of the vaccine that would have been necessary in order to save millions of lives. And to just have people whose job it is to do that, and not give them the power to do that, breaks people. And I think that's what we saw with Dr. Tedros. He was just broken; he had no answer to that question. Ultimately, everything he'd been talking about all that time, led him to a question with no answer.
Emily Silverman
He says in the film, "Above all, at the root of the pandemic is a deficit of solidarity and sharing, sharing of data, sharing of information, sharing resources, sharing technology and tools that every nation needs to keep its people safe. We're in the race of our lives. But it's not a fair race. And most countries have barely left the starting line." And so I am hoping not to leave this on too grim a note. But as somebody who has been covering pandemics and the interaction between people and disease, and science, and politics, and institutions, doing all the work that you've done, has there been a take-home or a lesson or an idea or a truth that has crystallized out of all of this, in your mind, something that you've taken away from both of these films?
David France
Well, Emily, I think the one central thing to focus on is public health authority, and how to cede power to public health officials. And we're going to have to find a way to do that. The next pandemic is not a hundred years away. Everybody knows it; everybody knows what it's gonna look like. Everybody's gonna know, everybody already knows, who's gonna get hit hardest. Everybody knows a strategic way to minimize that pain. But nobody knows how to supersede nationalism and corporate interest. And, until we figure out a way to do that, then we're just going to be condemned to this kind of suffering. And it's been an incredible amount of suffering over the last two plus years. Again and again, you know, as these pandemics come at us, and they will.
Emily Silverman
What is next for you? Do you have any plans for another COVID film since the COVID story is continuing to evolve? Or are you moving on to a different topic? Or what's on the horizon for David France?
David France
Well, I wish I had an answer for you. I wish I had an answer for me. So, we're working on a number of projects. I have to say, so How to Survive a Pandemic is my fourth film. Each of those four films, there are kind of mass death events. And I think for my fifth, I would like to keep everybody alive. So, that's my goal. And if I could make it a comedy, or a musical comedy, as a documentary, all the better.
Emily Silverman
That sounds awesome. I will definitely buy a ticket and sign up for that. Any final words you'd like to share with our audience of healthcare workers?
David France
Well, just a great big thanks. And you may not want the hero narrative, but I found one of the most moving things that I did during that awful first year of the pandemic, was to stand out on my fire escape every evening at seven o'clock and join with my fellow citizens in New York and around the world and just thanking the people who were making it possible to envision tomorrow, so thank you.
Emily Silverman
I have been speaking with David France. And we've been talking about two of his films How to Survive a Plague from 2012. And How to Survive a Pandemic from 2022. David, thank you for coming in.
David France
Thanks for having me. This was a great conversation.