American Amnesia

HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest to today's broadcast, David France.

He's an award-winning American investigative reporter, non-fiction author, and Oscar nominated documentarian who made the HBO original How to Survive a Pandemic.

Welcome, sir.

FRANCE: Hey, thanks for having me.

Good to be here.

HEFFNER: Congratulations on all the work you've accomplished in chronicling the pandemic.

We're here now filming in 2024.

A functional reality of the pandemic is we're still on Zoom.

My question just to begin is have we survived the pandemic?

Not from a physical perspective.

We're both still living and here talking to each other, but psychologically and mentally, do you think America has survived this pandemic?

FRANCE: It's a terrifying question, right?

Because I don't think we really know, we don't know what the lasting impact is gonna be on the so-called Pandemic Generation.

Those kids who didn't finish high school, who did high school from their bedrooms entered college from their bedrooms who missed so much fundamental time and socializing and character building.

We just don't know.

But, also, you know, people in my generation, we don't know what having thrown us into lockdown for all that time may have done for our own health and longevity.

So we don't know.

And what we do know is that we still have these spikes, right?

We're in the middle of one of the largest spikes in the entire pandemic.

Although here we are in 2024, still, as you point, relegated to these tiny windows in Zoom to make sure that we're healthy.

What we have survived is the extreme fatality part of the pandemic.

And that is thanks to the fast work of scientists, the huge amount of money that the US government spent and other governments spent on the research and development at breakneck speed around the vaccines that have made it not so that we don't catch COVID, but so that we're much less likely to get sick enough to go to a hospital and extremely less likely to die of it.

And that means that we're in the clear, at least in that way.

HEFFNER: That's helpful.

Something about semantics.

I'm really curious your perspective on this, because I am so meticulous in talking about the pandemic that I always use this frame “When the pandemic struck, ” and so many people tend to say “in the pandemic, ” like it was in the past, and you were an expert chronicler of this whole period.

I wonder if you also refrain from saying “in the pandemic, ” but rather use some kind of nomenclature like “since the pandemic struck ” or something to that effect.

FRANCE: I think you're right.

I talk about it as being the period of lockdown, that first period of the pandemic, the pandemic before the arrival of vaccines.

I just call that lockdown.

I think a lot of people call that the pandemic.

But it's like taking that phraseology to HIV/AIDS, right?

That we are still in the global pandemic, but it's no longer a plague.

It's no longer an untreatable disease that hasn't been attacked by science and another way one might- HEFFNER: Right.

No, that's helpful.

Another way one might do that is pre-vaccine or post-vaccine to delineate the culture in which we're living, having been up close and personal in filming this, editing the trauma that we experienced in that pre-vaccine phase.

Is there a legitimate understanding or way that we can say that since we see the impact of mRNA vaccines, despite the skeptics or conspiracy theorists that still exist, or the people who've stopped getting their boosters, and that's a real problem, do we feel like this was a penicillin level shock to the system, that perhaps we're more equipped now to deal with a future pandemic of a coronavirus form or something else?

Because like antibiotics was revolutionary?

mRNA technology is also revolutionary.

FRANCE: I think it's a very important distinction that you're making because it's not really the arrival of the vaccine, it's the vaccination, right?

That is what got us out the other end, and that's why my documentary- I didn't expect that it would be this way, but literally it's divided in half.

The first half brings us up to that incredible day when the FDA and other world regulatory bodies gave the green light to roll out the vaccine, but it took another year for those vaccines to begin to make their way around the country, I'm sorry, around the globe, there was hoarding of vaccines.

There was, as you're putting out, hesitancy around vaccines, there was shipping problems.

There were manufacturer bottlenecks, all sorts of reasons why that phase of the pandemic went on for another year.

I think it certainly is true that that science and the pharmacology lessons learned are scalable for any new epidemic.

And everybody says, we've got new and novel epidemics around the corner at an increasingly rapid pace given everything we've been doing in the environment in the way humans are encroaching on the jungle spaces where so many of these viruses exist without causing illness in animals.

But can we get those vaccines out?

I think I've been noticing that there's been a real lack of efforts to study what went wrong in hesitancy in campaigns to try to get people to accept the science in this whole kind of national nationalist bottlenecking that we saw with the United States really hoarding the first six months or nine months of output from these pharmaceutical companies, and keeping them from the places where the epidemic was really burning the hottest.

How do we address that from a public health perspective, public health standpoint?

The mRNA might be the absolute answer for this next phase of, of, of human existence, but if we can't get it out to people, we're gonna have the same problem next time that we had this time.

HEFFNER: Let me ask you this, David, are you experiencing either anecdotally or [inaudible] in your continuing to track this post vaccination period the increasing commonness of people reluctant to get a second or third booster shot among your network?

And again, to the extent you've reported on this, beyond your network, just a growing trend of concern that people are declining to keep up with the science?

FRANCE: I have actually, and you know, the data on the newest update for the booster shows us that only one in five Americans have taken it, which is suggestive of a growing problem, right?

So our uptake in the first years of the pandemic was much higher than that, not across the board, but on average.

And now that like four out of five Americans are just not taking the booster, puts them at risk of this new surge, which we've been seeing and will condemn us to a longer period of having to deal with this now annual exposure to the virus.

Is it impacting people?

In my own world, I know my family members have not taken the new booster, and they all argue in one way or another in a kind of illogical, anti-science way, why what they're doing is the right thing to do.

And that message hasn't been sold well enough, I guess I hate to blame the people who have walked away when there's so much blame to be put right on public health mechanisms and approaches that that need to be updated and rethought constantly.

It's not enough to have that single message they gave us at the end of 2020.

We need to keep rolling out those messages in new and effective ways.

HEFFNER: Is it amnesia?

Is it a consensus in the population that unless you are severely immunocompromised, this is now the flu?

Remember Tony Fauci and Andrew Cuomo and others saying originally, reassuring the American public, this is more similar to that than dissimilar.

They were wrong.

Fauci, others saying masking was not necessary at an early stage of the pandemic.

So is it some combination of amnesia or real life experience that the people for whom COVID is now fatal are people who are more severely hampered by medical problems?

And that's just the common or conventional understanding now?

FRANCE: I think it's a combination of all of those but it's also inflamed by politics still.

We've just seen the DeSantis campaign running against Tony Fauci, and Fauci has long retired now.

But in fact, since, since he went into retirement, we haven't had somebody replace him or attempt to replace him to argue in the support of science and science is messy.

It's discovery is messy.

And that's what we saw in the beginning of the pandemic novel coronavirus.

Nobody really knew what to expect with it nor did they know what messages would work.

So he made errors, but it's not because he was wrong, it's because science is iterative and brings us to better understandings all the time.

But people are still, carrying around pitchforks for poor Tony Fauci, for having done really what he could do.

I know Dr. Fauci from his work in HIV/AIDS where I first met him in the early eighties, he made some terrible mistakes in the early eighties that he's apologized for, and he's has had shame for, nothing like that in the Coronavirus pandemic.

He was really at the top of his game, and yet he fell victim to this kind of political backlash, this growing sense in America and around the world that the expertise of people with actual knowledge is something to be rejected.

In fact, homegrown solutions to be embraced.

And that's still going on.

We still hear it in the political sphere.

We still hear it amongst Americans especially, but also around the world uniquely.

And I should point out that what everybody feared at the beginning of the COVID Pandemic was that Black and Brown communities in America would be the hardest to reach with effective messages to bring them into the fold of science and the scientific work around the pandemic.

And yet the work that had been done to counter that right from the beginning really dismantled the hesitancy in those communities that had been there for generations, really the suspicion of medical establishment not having their interests at heart.

So we learned that we could do it, but that it really has to be done in a kind of a proactive way.

What happened meanwhile was this incredible explosion of hesitancy among white Americans, kind of middle Americans, and we never expected to see it there.

It was quite a surprise.

HEFFNER: And you're saying that in light of the fact that white Americans were not the victims of government experimentation and the eugenics movement as much as non-white Americans.

I think you're also making the point that despite the fact that Fauci to some degree was scapegoated and maligned, inappropriately, that even with some dubious decisions that were a function of variables that we didn't necessarily know, it was better to have someone like Fauci on the public scene than not have him.

And you're saying the consequence of not having him, or a celebrity doctor figure, is that one out of five Americans has not boosted since his departure?

I think it's a very fair point.

I mentioned amnesia because you powerfully chronicle the pandemic's impact on the human tragedy of America and disproportionate health outcomes, and the trauma inflicted upon families, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more have died of COVID in America than on 9/11.

And I wanted to get you to reflect on this because there is undoubtedly amnesia about 9/11.

I don't know that that amnesia began five years after 9/11.

It certainly didn't begin three years after 9/11.

So of course, there is horror of watching the planes zooming into the buildings and the death and despair and ground zero, also having the unity of purpose to battle a common enemy, namely Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden, which we did somewhat successfully as a cohesive unified American public for a couple years.

With the Pandemic, we know that the effect of lockdowns was eliciting divisiveness, ultimately, after maybe a week.

But I wanted to get you to weigh in as a filmmaker on these two cataclysmic events and the fact that it took 20 plus years, but 9/11 is unknown or a distant memory to a lot of Americans.

But sort of immediately after COVID and ongoing pandemic that we're living in the amnesia happened.

What do you make of this?

FRANCIS: Well, I'll go back even earlier to the HIV pandemic in the US.

Same thing happened there.

You know, 600,000 plus Americans died of HIV in a country that threw no money at research for medications for the disease, no money at prevention.

It was a kind of an official policy of blaming the people who were suffering from HIV and allowing them to die.

It was a huge hole was ripped in American society, certainly in American culture.

Much has been written about what we lost in the arts, for example, in that period of 15 years of unmitigated death, mass death in the US.

And then as soon as medication came around, and I'm a journalist who had covered that period so closely, there was what was described as a kind of fatigue among the readers, consumers of news and history about what happened there.

It was impossible to bring the subject back up, and it was another 15 years before people were ready to look back at that period and try to make sense of it.

I made a film at that new 15 year mark called How to Survive a Plague about HIV and the activism that went into the scientific efforts around the disease.

I noticed that there was a similar 15 year period of call it amnesia around like other horrific events, the Holocaust, for example, the, there, there was no reflective writing or publishing or historicizing around the Holocaust for 15 years.

It took that period of time for people to be ready to look back and look for those messages.

We're at that window now for 9/11, right?

So it would be the time to look back and see what lessons could be learned.

What did it mean to us as a people, as a civilization, as a country, as humanity?

What did all of that mean?

We haven't spent that time yet, and I think that it's, it we are certainly too close to SARS-CoV-2, to the COVID-19 pandemic to know what it meant to us to know what it's done to us.

That was your first question that you asked, like have we survived it?

And we don't know, and we won't know until we have enough distance, I think, to look back and take that measure.

HEFFNER: Are you hopeful though that that distance might also regenerate wisdom in response to these events, for example, with respect to immunizations, vaccinations, preventative measures like mask wearing?

Is that feasible that the historical understanding, as opposed to the time proximity to the events can have that constructive impact even if it's five years from now?

FRANCE: I would think so, right?

So if we look back and we have this just passionate collection of data that tells us what worked and what didn't work, if we also are measure our own emotional reactions to what happened, to what we've witnessed, to what we experienced and lived through what we lost, if we roll all that together into a kind of a collective understanding, and it takes a long time for society to collectivize knowledge and perspective, then I think it would put us in a stronger position for moving forward.

It certainly did after, after polio, right?

I mean, the, the real work that we did in understanding polio took a half a generation or more for us to look back and say, this is what, this is what we learned.

This is what this is, this is the good that came of polio.

This, this is what the gift that we got from the experience and, uh, and the e the, the collectivized efforts around response to it.

And so I think that still awaits us.

HEFFNER: I've often raised on this broadcast, our listeners and viewers will know the fanaticism and maybe rightly so in response to the Ebola outbreak, even though it was a handful of people, some who were sent via airplane to the facility at the University of Nebraska to be treated in order to isolate.

And those of us who had a memory of that wanted to create a perimeter quickly and have a far more expedite isolation at the beginning of this infection.

I've long stipulated that even if it had been relatively fewer people who died, let's say 500 people to a thousand people, but you saw the original of gushing bloodiness and gore and seizures, and what Ebola represents.

Of course we saw folks in glassed off rooms on oxygen and that we thought ought to be enough, we have to be careful, we have to be watchful, but I've thought that if this had been emanating from an undeveloped country and a plague that looks like it in every way from the beginning, and five minutes after, after exposure, you have bloody pustules forming that a lot of damage would've been averted.

A thousand people might have died, not millions.

FRANCE: Interesting, but we had a disease also that we didn't really understand if you could see the blood issue that you're describing, but we couldn't see it.

We knew some people were doing well, some people weren't doing well.

Some people had these sudden death moments in the beginning, you remember that, hear stories about people, walking to the hospital dropping dead.

But it was so scary and so mysterious without a single description, like a single understood description of what was causing it.

A lot like HIV, right?

Because people were not- nobody died of HIV everybody died of the opportunistic infections that their depleted immune system invited.

And it seemed so mysterious and created that kind of a backlash that you're describing that had happened in COVID.

HEFFNER: To me as a filmmaker, you would have a really insightful answer on this, documenting those last gasps of air may be different in the effect that it has on a viewing population than gushing blood.

To me that it may be a simplistic characterization but there's a reason that Scarface and The Godfather and The Departed generated mass audiences and are still cited in the films that capture that kind of, The Sopranos, namely.

As an observer of the science, the illumination of that medical plague that was COVID.

Do you agree with that?

That kind of basic equation?

Had it looked different, we might have acted different?

FRANCE: Well, maybe, I mean, it's all a hypothetical, right?

We also know- I'm a documentary filmmaker.

There are certain things that documentary films have trouble capturing, like Ebola, you know, to filmmakers don't often take the risks necessary to show up in the middle of an Ebola outbreak and film it because it's so wildly risky.

And that's what was happening in the beginning days of COVID.

Nobody wanted to go inside those buildings where the sick people were.

And if you could get inside there, the hospitals didn't want you to come in.

So there were very few images that were actually captured in that way that you're describing it just would not have been possible.

HEFFNER: David, in the 30 seconds we have remaining, what are you working on next?

FRANCE: Ah, interesting.

I'm working on a number of projects.

The one I'm most excited about right now is a project with Leonard Peltier, who is best known as a member of the American Indian Movement, who was jailed in the mid-seventies for a murder that now everyone agrees he didn't commit.

There's no evidence that he committed it.

There's evidence that someone else committed it.

Um, and yet in a true Kafka, um, nightmare, he has not been able to get himself out of federal prison.

He is been there for almost 50 years.

The Anniversary's coming up next year, and we're reexamining his case.

And what it tells us about America's responsibility for its relationship with indigenous Americans, and also the problems of political prisoners in the US.

HEFFNER: That sounds like something we'll all want to watch.

David France, an award-winning American investigative reporter, author and Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker, creator of How to Survive a Pandemic.

Thank you so much for your insight today.

FRANCE: Pleasure to be with you.

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