Documenting the Race to a Vaccine with David France
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You're listening to The Nocturnist Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. History is always happening. We wake up, we read the news, we're living in history. But lately, this sense of living in history has felt more acute. We're living in a time of political upheaval, social upheaval, biomedical upheaval, 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 Nocturnist, 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 nonfiction 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.
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 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 or think. But they don't call it what it is. Why not? I mean, that's the question I want an answer for, actually. because social responsibility, just something you would expect from a decent human being. When the whole world is burning, it's about humanity. I imagine you have been on the phone with leaders of vaccine companies. I encourage them to help. And what was the reaction?
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 it's happening now on our watch again. And in general, this question comes, when do we learn?
I am sitting here with David France. David, thank you so much for being here today.
Well, thanks for having me.
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.
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