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This article explores how pro-vaccination cultural products\u00a0\u200bsuch as\u00a0<jats:italic>Contagion<\/jats:italic>\u00a0might in fact undermine public health efforts by promoting a false narrative,\u00a0which\u00a0simplifies the kind of vaccination campaign\u00a0necessary\u00a0for herd immunity to develop. An ethic of sacrifice and selflessness drives the public health messaging of the film but leaves intact certain individualistic tropes and plague narrative scapegoating tendencies, while the framing of the vaccine as \u201cgift\u201d takes it out of the realm of medical science altogether.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s10912-021-09677-3","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,2,18]],"date-time":"2021-02-18T19:09:25Z","timestamp":1613675365000},"page":"51-62","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":10,"title":["COVID-19, Contagion, and Vaccine Optimism"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"42","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1859-2991","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Kelly","family":"McGuire","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,2,15]]},"reference":[{"issue":"3","key":"9677_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"443","DOI":"10.1353\/dis.2008.a364474","volume":"30","author":"Bill Albertini","year":"2008","unstructured":"Albertini, Bill. 2008. \u201cContagion and the Necessary Accident.\u201d Discourse 30 (3): 443-460.","journal-title":"Discourse"},{"key":"9677_CR2","unstructured":"-----. 2009. \u201cGeographies of Contagion.\u201d Rhizomes 19. 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See Philip Ball\u2019s May 13 2020 piece, \u201cThe\u00a0Anti-Vaccine Movement Could Undermine Efforts to End Coronavirus Pandemic, Researchers Warn.\u201d<sup>2<\/sup> For background on the twentieth-century debates, see James Colgrove\u2019s work on the politics of vaccination (<i>States of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century<\/i> America) and Elena Conis\u2019s <i>Vaccine Nation: America\u2019s Changing Relationship With Immunization.<\/i><sup>3<\/sup> See Sarah Heath\u2019s article in <i>Patient Engagement.<\/i><sup>4<\/sup> At the time of writing this article, Pfizer and Moderna had both announced that their vaccines are 90% and 95% effective, respectively.<sup>5<\/sup> See Alfred Tauber in particular for a corrective to the \u201cdefensive\u201d model of immunity. In addition, the anthropologist, Emily Martin, has been addressing individualistic and gendered constructions of the immune system since the 1990s\u00a0from an anthropological perspective.<sup>6<\/sup> Indeed, as Mark Davis and Davina Lohm have observed in in recent work on the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, \u201ccontemporary immunopolitics are individualized and have therefore abandoned the collective mobilization of public life in relation to pandemic threat. Politically and biologically, immunity is foremost a method of signifying how self is distinguished from other in the process of detecting and destroying pathogens\u201d (2020, 115).<sup>7<\/sup> As Priscilla Wald writes, outbreak narratives are typically stories of \u201ctragedy and triumph, horror and salvation\u201d (2008. 56).<sup>8<\/sup> Having dismissed the appeals of scientists and public health officials for the last year, the former Trump administration\u2019s embracing of science for political expediency is understandably a cause for alarm, putting those who generally favour vaccination in the awkward and unfamiliar position of now questioning its science. Some anti-vaxxers in the United States also find themselves called to vaccinate by someone they look to as a leader, in a disorienting disruption of the ideological positions that typically align with the divergent and irreconcilable world views of the right and the left.<sup>9<\/sup> A National Geographic and Morning Consult poll released on December 7 filled many with consternation when it revealed that fully one quarter of respondents identifying as women indicated that they were unlikely to take a coronavirus vaccine when one came available. This news shook the optimism of those triumphantly celebrating the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as unprecedented breakthroughs in the world of vaccinology.<sup>10<\/sup> Polls that Professor Joshua Greenberg and his research team at Carleton University in Canada conducted in the spring of 2020 suggested that the curve of vaccine hesitancy had not in fact been flattened and that the endeavour to foster vaccine confidence in the general public will pose more of a challenge than popular visual narratives like the one cited above might suggest. Discussed in this university news item:.<sup>11<\/sup> Although polls released in December of 2020 shortly before the Pfizer vaccine received FDA approval suggest that confidence in the science of the mRNA vaccine has increased in recent months, they nonetheless indicate that considerable skepticism remains, with one in four of the women polled purportedly identifying themselves as \u201cunlikely\u201d they would accept a vaccine. Indeed, as mentioned above, the particular conditions under which SARS-Cov-2 vaccines are produced invite us to reconsider what it means to be hesitant.<sup>12<\/sup> Madison Powers and Ruth Faden have addressed these failures at length in <i>Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health<\/i> (2006), which establishes the promotion of well-being (and remediation of existing inequalities) as central to a social justice-oriented program of public health. In a thread on Twitter and articles published in <i>The Atlantic,<\/i> Julia Marcus has called for more empathetic public health outreach and harm reduction infused with empathy..<sup>13<\/sup> In her account of how viruses are ascribed agency and malevolent intent in outbreak narratives from the 1990s onward, Priscilla Wald writes, \u201cNothing better illustrates the reluctance to accept Nature\u2019s indifference toward human beings and the turn from the ecological analysis in accounts of emerging infections of all varieties than the seemingly irresistible tendency to animate a microbial foe\u2026Scientists emphasize the microbes\u2019 lack of conscious agency. But the animation of the microbe invariably surfaces during the course of these accounts\u201d (2008, 42).<sup>14<\/sup> Interestingly, Mitch Emhoff as a lay person is the foil for Krumwiede; he is a science accepting, pro-vax everyman able to move freely in public without the make-shift hazmat suit of the latter.<sup>15<\/sup> For more on xenophobia and virus narratives, see Bill Albertini\u2019s \u201cGeographies of Contagion.\u201d Heather Schell also notes that outbreak narratives of the 1990s typically take Africa as the point of origin for pandemics, whereas Asia has increasingly become the focus since SARS, while Priscilla Wald\u2019s <i>Contagious<\/i> addresses Sinophobia in her introductory chapter to <i>Contagious.<\/i><sup>16<\/sup> Wald characterizes Oedipus as the original \u201csuperspreader\u201d in her discussion of transgression and divine displeasure in early plague narratives (2008, 15\u201317).<sup>17<\/sup> The CDC custodian and his son are two other characters unaffiliated with public health but are comparatively peripheral to the narrative, while Alan Krumwiede is clearly cast as the villain of the film.<sup>18\u00a0<\/sup>See\u00a0Pamela\u00a0McClintock\u2019s \u201cBox Office Report: Steven Soderbergh\u2019s \u2018Contagion\u2019 Winning Weekend Race\u201d (September 10, 2011).\u00a0<i>The Hollywood Reporter<\/i>. Retrieved\u00a0June 28,\u00a02012.<sup>19<\/sup> Examples include Daniel Defoe\u2019s <i>Journal of the Plague Year,<\/i> Albert Camus\u2019s <i>La Peste,<\/i> and Charles Brockden Brown\u2019s <i>Arthur Mervyn.<\/i><sup>20<\/sup> Another example of medical altruism is demonstrated by the contact tracer, Erin Mears, who, having contracted MEV-1, finds herself in the very emergency treatment centre she had helped establish and gives her coat to a bedmate as a dying act of charity.<sup>21<\/sup> See Marcel Mauss, <i>The Gift<\/i> and Derrida, <i>Given Time. I. Counterfeit Money<\/i>.<sup>22<\/sup> One might also look to the 2007 film adaptation of <i>I am Legend<\/i> for a similar resolution in the Christ-like gift of his blood that Robert Neville proffers to the survivors of the zombie\/vampire plague as a kind of vaccine (that the film gets the science of vaccination dramatically wrong is another matter).<sup>23<\/sup> As LA Alfonso argues, \u201cthe shot of freezers containing \u2018secure\u2019 samples of deadly viruses is followed by an image of a silver bow on a gift-wrapped present. The shape and silver of the bow suggest intentionally but subliminally an opening of a Pandora\u2019s Box in a future scenario.\u201d.<sup>24<\/sup> I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.<sup>25<\/sup> I have discussed the racial implications of this exchange in a previous article on vaccine rationing.<sup>26<\/sup> A virus that is apparently based on SARS.<sup>27<\/sup> See opening comment of this article for context.","order":1,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Endnotes"}}]}}