Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric, and welcome to next Question. In this unprecedented time of the coronavirus pandemic, many of us are cooped up on edge, full of anxiety about our upturned worlds and fearful that family, friends, are ourselves could succumb to this virulent bug. And yet a lot of people are finding comfort in a surprising source, Steven Soderbergh's two thousand and eleventh thriller Contagion. A mysterious and highly contagious virus crosses continents in a matter of days and kills Gwyneth Paltrow within the first eight minutes of the movie. What happened to her? What happened to her? The result citywide lockdowns, panic driven looting, spreeze, and mass graves. And without a vaccine, we can anticipate that approximately one in people on the planet will contract the disease. When I recently rewatched the movie, like thousands of you according to social media and the iTunes charts, I was struck by how familiar it all seemed, from the rapid spread, to the government's controlled messaging, to the social distancing and a public growing more frightened by the day. I do think in times of you know, anxiety and panic, people turn to popular culture to enhance their understanding of what's going on. Scott Burns is a filmmaker and the screenwriter of Contagion, and he said, though the movie seems prescient now, if you talked to any one of the experts he consulted with ten or twelve years ago, they would have told you the very same thing, that it was a matter of when and not if we would encounter exactly what we're encountering. So I believe in science, and I think of people who I worked with are extraordinarily dedicated scientists. So um, I'm not surprised, which leads me to my next question. What kind of movie about a pandemic teach us about the real thing? I was lucky enough to spend a little bit of time, from the comfort of our own homes, of course, with not only Scott Burns, but also one of the lead consultants on the film, Dr Ian Lipkin, a k a. The Virus Hunter. Yes, I'm me a loopcoun my professor at Columbia University, and I worked closely with Scott in developing the concept of the film. Before we talked to Dr Lipkin about his reaction when you approached him to be a consultant on this film. What piqued your interest initially, Scott in tackling this in the form of a feature film. Steven Soderberg and I had just completed doing another film with Matt Damon called The Informant and we were actually um on our way home and he said, what do you think you want to do next? And I said that I want to do a pandemic movie that is entirely science based. I had seen Outbreak when I was growing up, like a lot of people, um, but I wanted to do one that was, you know, more of the moment and really looked at a pandemic as sort of a tracer bullet through our society. So you decide you want to put your lens on this topic and you want to do as much research as possible. How were you led to Dr Ian in terms of his knowledge on the topic, Well, The informant Um and a movie I had done before that. I had done with a company in l A called participant Um, which is owned by Jeff Skoll, and Jeff Um has a philanthropical arm to his company and they focus on a variety of threats to the world. One of them was pandemic illness. And because Jeff and I knew each other, when he found out, I wanted to, you know, to write that as my next movie. He insisted that he be involved in his company and be involved because it was so central to their mission. And uh, Jeff introduced me to Dr Larry Brilliant, who was an epidemiologist in the Bay area. Um and and Larry was my first point of contact, and he was part of a team, you know, along with d. A. Henderson, that helped eradicate smallpox in the sixties. Um and I had lunch with Larry, and like I said, he was one of the people who said, it's really a matter of when and not if. And he told me that he thought the best barologists in the world was was Ian Lipkin. And he helped me get a meeting with Ian. And when I sat in the end's office, the agreement that we made was that this was only worth doing if the science was authentic. Um and we began to talk about the limitations of what that might mean to a story, and it became clear to me in talking to Ian that when you look at the complexity of nature, and when you begin to understand what viruses are um, you know, sadly there really are no limitations. Dr Lipkin, when you were approached by Scott, what did you think of the notion of turning this into a movie. Ironically, there were two independent filmmakers who approached me one day after the next in the same location to talk about making a pandemic movie, and Scott was the first. I met the second individual who wanted to make something that was going to look like Outbreak, which was an unrealistic, a very entertaining film, and I came back to Scott and I said, let's do this. From the very beginning was clear that what Scott wanted to do was to educate as well as entertain, so that this would have an impact. So we had a great deal of fun deciding what the virus would look like, what the various components would be of storyline. He understands obviously narrative, and what I was trying to do is to provide the scientific underpinning for what he wanted to do, and then periodically to provide a sort of a list of things that I thought were critical to convey, which he would then weave into the story. So it was a very, very interactive process and a great deal of fun. I was going to say only a virologists would describe that as a great deal of fun, Doctor Lipkin. And when when you talked about what was critical to include in the plot, and then Scott, I want to ask you about how you did this monumental research because you did it, I understand for three over three years. But were some of the things that you wanted to ensure would be featured in the movie, Dr Lipkin. From the very beginning, we want to emphasize the point of one health, the idea that infectious agents emerge in wildlife and then move into humans. We wanted to understand the factors that contribute to that and what can be done for risk reduction, and the sorts of things we identified then I have played out here. We wanted to talk about the challenges and finding ways to identify an infectious agent, the political interactions which can interfere with progress and sign it's which he covered extremely well. The social unrest that was associated with people who come out of the woodwork promising various false panases. We'd begun to see those here too. And then the implications of such an outbreak for social structure, loss of life, how we respond, and ultimately how it all resolves. One positive thing emanating from this, Dr Lipkin is, in recent years science has been treated with skepticism and even hostility by many people, not only in this country but around the world. Do you think this will win back some of the I think much needed and much an appropriate respect for the scientific community. I hope so. UM. When the movie first came out, there was a big uptick and applications for training at the CDC in the Epidemiology Intelligence Service. We think, you know, as I look right now at the number of applications we're receiving at the School of Public Health of Columbia, despite the fact that we're shut down, there are people are writing asking how can they join, how can they be helpful, what can they do? So it is having an impact in that respect. This trend to not believe science or to dismiss it, uh, must be disconcerting to you. It is one of the large challenges we have is that people think that their ways to shortcut, for example, with clinical trials, and it's very important that we have appropriately controlled trials otherwise we get to the end of a trial and we don't know what works and what doesn't, and we subject people to expense and risk that's really unjustified. Um. So another example of that is vaccines. People have this notion who don't understand how vaccines are trialed and proven, that we can just roll out of vaccine in a few months time, and it's just not true. It's critical that the leadership on which we rely at the very top of the regional and state and federal governments respect the people who are trying to give them the best information that they can. So the President has excellent people in the director of n I I D. Tony Fauci and and um, you know in the new head of the of the Task Force, Deborah Burkeleum. But sometimes they appear to be sidelined. And this is unfortunate because some of the drugs that are proposed haven't really been proven to be a use. Maybe they will be, and maybe they want um. So it's important that we do this in the stepwise and the logical fashion so that we minimize the risk of people when we come back will isolate the moments in the movie that nine years later seems so real contagion, of course, isn't just about the spread of a new virus. It's about the spread of information about how narratives around public health are created, who creates them, and how they're disseminated. And it's this behind the scenes element of the movie that's so uncanny to watch today. Pretty early in the film, we're introduced to Kate Winslett's character, an epidemic intelligence officer with the CDC who's been dispatched to Minnesota where there's been a cluster of an infections and deaths. She meets with the heads of the Minnesota Department of Health to evaluate the situation and determine the public response and how's the public going to react to that. It's hard to say plastic shark in a movie will keep people from getting in the ocean, But a warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes when we're going to need to walk the government through this before we start to freak everybody out. I mean, we can't even tell people right now what they should be afraid of. We tried that with swine food, and all we did was get healthy people scared. That's really eerie, Scott listening to that dialogue. Yeah, well, um, you know, when I went to CDC, you know, one of the things that I learned early on is that we have fifty different state health departments and you know, within those states, they all operate differently. And one of the tricky parts of this, and we're certainly seeing it, is you need a coherent sort of program because without that, you know, you get this patchwork going, and a virus doesn't really care about a state border, um, and so much of you know, there's so much interstate travel and commerce in this country, and then you know there's the entire globe, and so until you have a consistent federal program that tells the states how to act, and that it's embraced by the state's governors, regardless of their political orientation, we're very, very vulnerable. And it's tricky to explain to people who don't have a background in these things how how they proliferate. And that's what I was trying to do in that scene, is is think about if you're someone who is sent to a state to tell them, you know what's going on, Um, you know what the resistance is. You're going to meet just from the officials, not to mention from the general public. So at this point, I think we have to believe this is respiratory maybe fall mights too. What's that it refers to transmission from surfaces. The average person touches their face two or three thousand times a day, two or three thousand times a day, three to five times every waking minute. In between, we're touching door knobs, water fountains, elevator buttons, and each other. Those things become mights. The only pushback we had from the Minnesota Department of Health was that they said, nobody needs to explain to us what a foam might is. And my defense of that was, well, we needed a teachable moment and we had to do this, unfortunately at your expense, but somebody had to be Somebody had to explain what an or not was. That wasn't part of what you were talking about there, but which is the transmissibility in text and what full mights are, so that we could get that point across that said, this is a um. This is a harbinger of what came to be recently because it turns out that FOAMT transmission is extremely important with this infection. This virus persists on surfaces for up to three days, and so the opportunities for transmission are much greater, and they are with many respiratory tract infections. So we have say, as you said at the very beginning, Katie, this is eerily prophetic. But so many things in the film are, which I think is really a testament to Scott's imagination and somehow managing put it all in there. What about the battle that we heard unfolding between Kate Winslet's character and all the considerations about how transparent you should be. It's the biggest shopping weekend of the year. I think we need to consider closing schools and who stays home with the kids, people that work at stores, government work as people that work at hospitals. When will we know what this is? Have you seen those factors being brought to bear, Dr Lipkin in the current pandemic. Three weeks ago, I had a conversation with a very high level official, elected official where we talked about closing schools, and I said that I thought this was something that we should do. And the response that came back from not only this elected official, but also the individuals who were advising this official, was that there was going to be no way to feed the children who depended on schools for their breakfasts and for their lunch. And then when these children went home, their parents were going to have no way to take care of them, and the grandparents who frequently assigned to take care of these children might become infected because these kids would carry back this virus from the community into their houses. And I said, I understand all of things things, but if we don't do it now, it's going to get worse. And ultimately, of course, this is what we've done. We've had to close all of these schools. We need a national policy, we actually need an international policy. But if we just stick naturally for a moment, we need to have a way in which everybody understands that this is what we're going to need to do for some period of time. And I think that period of time is probably six weeks, maybe eight weeks. But we have to enforce it rigorously if we're going to get out of this. Were you disappointed with the both the response at the federal, state and local level to this pandemic? Very much so? Um I came back from China the first week of February, and it was clear to me that we were headed for a very difficult situation. I managed to speak with a number of people I know quite well. One of them is the mayor of Chicago, who's an old family friend, and she took things very seriously, but she was unable to do much of what she wanted to do. And here in New York, as you know, UM, there's been a struggle between the city and the state, upstate and downstate in terms of kinds of responses that we're willing to entertain. I think that we should have closed things earlier, and I think that that would have made a difference, But we'll never know. What about the federal response. Dr Lipkin, Well, the problem in talking about the response at the federal level is that I don't want to discourage cooperation. I think there are many things that the President has done that I think I've been extremely helpful. I think that some decisions about closing borders, for example, uh two people who are coming in from areas where they were concerns, we're very very useful. I was very concerned when I heard that he was proposing that we opened everything up. I he's served because I think that would be too soon. But he's now back off and and I'm very appreciative that he's done that. I think that's important. Why do you think people did not take the potential threat seriously? In this kind of work, you're a victim of your own success. If you're proactive, if you prevent an outbreak from taking hold, then nobody really knows about it. You've been successful, but there's no you know, it's not like you store up goodwill and resources so that you'd be ready for the next one. The feeling therefore is that it's really not going to happen, and people become somewhat complacent. After nine eleven with the anthrax attacks, there was a lot of interest in jump starting the biological research that we do into emerging infectious agents and bio defense in general, and there was a program set up which is one of the first places I worked with Larry Brilliant closely. It's something called the National bio Surveillance Advisory Subcommittee's a very long name, but our objective was to try to figure out how prepared we were to get the information needed so that we would be able to respond in real time in the event or emergency. One of the things we learned and that was established under under George Bush was that UM, there was a lot of duplication within the government, we could become more efficient and more effective if we were to synchronize the integrated efforts. And then the second version of that which was under Obama, I shared with the Jeffrey Engel from North Carolina who was in the Department of Health. There that group came out with a very similar set of recommendations to the first group and UM and then that committee was disbanded and to my knowledge it's not been reconvened, and I don't know that ever will be convened. So without that committee in place in the White House providing real time advice to the people who need to make decisions, it's very difficult to see how we're going to get out of this. When we have financial crisis, we have a fit right which responds and tries to make decisions and has some autonomy. We don't have that. In public health. We have very very good people like UM, you know at n A h h h S and I think the Secretary of h h S is also excellent, but they are purely advisory and if people don't listen to them, UH, then there is a there's a risk and in this case, a price to be paid. Scott, I thought we might explore the behavior of this virus through your film. Matt Damon, who is the protagonist, is immune to this. If I'm immune, can't you use my blood to cure this? Blood serums can take a long time to make and are very expensive. But the good news here is that you're not going to get sick. Tell me how you were able to establish him as a character and why that was so important to the plot of the film. Um. Well, he's Matt Damon and nobody wants to see him die. Um, So that part was easy. No, there you go. You're going all Hollywood on us, Scott. One of the things that he and I discussed is that humans are all very different, and we're seeing it with this virus as well, and that people you know who have underlying conditions may have one experience, people who are of a certain age may have another. UM, And that you know in the film, Matt's character is exposed um, but doesn't get sick. Um. And I think that that's an important thing for us to remember at this moment in in time, is that you know that humans have seen pandemics before and that, you know, we survive and we have remarkable immune systems. Um. You know, I think that that that's something that people should celebrate. We're we're pretty you know, incredible animals. Everyone has a different experience, and just as in history there's a typhoid mary um who can spread a disease, there are also individuals who seem to be resistant and we can learn quite a bit from them. Dr Lipkoln there are Matt Damon's running around who are seemed to be immune to this virus UM. I think that as we learn more about this pandemic, we're going to find that the majority of people who are infected have only mild disease or no apparent disease whatsoever, and there are ways in which we can sort this out. It's not going to help us in the short term, but in the longer term I think it will. I think what we're going to find is that the majority of people who are infected with a virus don't have symptoms or have only mild symptoms of the disease. They are nonetheless capable of infecting other people, particularly people who are vulnerable because they have underlying medical conditions. Obesity, hypertension, diabetes, or they simply happen to be older. Right, and if you're a smoker, very good time to stop. Well. I've heard of cases where seemingly healthy people who haven't smoked for decades are succumbing to this disease, or people who have never smoked in the first place. Um, have you been able to understand why somebody healthy in their thirties or forties seems to be affected? Is that the level of virus they're coming into contact with or could it be an underlying condition they just don't know about. I think either of those is possible. I mean, there aren't people who probably do get a larger dose of virus than others. Uh, And they're probably people who are even a compromised but don't realize it, either because they're not getting sufficient sleep, or because they're malnourished, or there's something about which they're not aware. There may also be genetic factors that we don't yet understand. All of this is understudy now in many institutions. We should say it's somewhat of a cruel irony that you yourself dr lipkin as you stifle yet another cough has been you've been diagnosed with COVID nineteen. How do you think you got it? And how are you doing well? There? There is a concern initially because we do work with the virus in our laboratory, that I might have become infected there, but in fact the virus work is not something I had been anywhere near UH for several weeks, and we didn't even open the virus that we're using as a sample to grow the stocks or using for our work now until after I had already left the LAMB. So my case was a community acquired I traveled through China without any difficulty, never never got infected there, and I got infected here in the community. This is now a community acquired disease and it's very easy for anyone to get it. And one of the reasons why I talked about the fact that I was infected was to make the point that if I can get infected, knowing what I do, know, anybody can get infected. This is a disease that there's a risk to us all. Can you tell us what the symptoms have been for you with coronavirus. Yes, I had an upper respiratory attract infection that was not COVID that proceeded this UH, and I was recovering from that. I felt like I was doing quite well, and then suddenly I developed a sort of a nonproductive cough and a fever and then a splitting headache. And I never got headaches, and I had that, and I knew that something was different. So I went into my UH, not into the laboratory, but I drove to the laboratory and I took swabs and I handed them off to my team because we have tests for all of these things. And they called me up and they said, you have an enormous amount of virus and so far one of the highest viral loads we've seen. So I've been recovering from that, and I wish everybody, well, this is not something that you're gonna want to get. It's tough, particularly in my UH people my vintage. You're older, but you are you are on the men because some people say they feel better and then they their health sort of goes down downward, and then they feel better again. So where are you on this side of day eleven? So I'm I feel like I'm truly on the mend at this point. It's it's a slow process. But yesterday I walked. Two days ago, I walked a mile, yesterday a mile and a half. Today I'm going to do two. And I'm going to get back into get back into shape as quickly as I can. There's an enormous amount of work to do coming up. How our pandemic nightmare might end. That's right after this spoiler alert everyone. By the end of Contagion, the heroic scientists working against the clock are able to develop a vaccine for the movie's fictional pathogen called M e v one. And let me tell you, by the end you'll need a little good news. This vaccine as a result of the courage and perseverance of a remarkable few, we shall now begin the drawing. John. Yeah, first, M e v one vaccination. Are those people born on March I almost cried at the end for my appreciation of the public health system, but of science and medicine in general. When you see those people standing in line waiting for the vaccine, it reminded me of when I was, I think, in kindergarten and they used those little sugar cubes. Um I think was it was that a polio vaccine I was getting at the time. Well, I remember that very well, these little pink sugar cubes that they gave to all the kids. Do you think this will end with the vaccine? Do you think it will end with these drugs that help people once they've been infected. How do you see this whole saga ending. The vaccine is going to be the definitive end for this challenge to public health. During the interim, we're going to be able to chip away it's some of the morbidding mortality using plasma therapy and drugs that are in the process of being discovered and developed. In the short term, the key is going to be the social distancing and testing that allow us to ensure that that the isolation is working. And that's really where I think the folks, the folks I need to be now on the social distancing and and the use of plasma therapy to treat people who are sick or exposed while we continue to work on the vaccine. And I want to just recap what Tony Fauci continually says, which is that the vaccine is not around the corner. It's six eighteen months. So this is going to be a marathon, and the American people need to be prepared for that and rise to it like they have for every other challenge we've had since our inception. Do you believe that once people are infected, they will have immunity to the virus or is that a big question mark still? I think it's a I think it is a question mark there. The evidence that we have from very small animal studies with non in primates, with Reese's monkeys is that there is at least part at least there's immunity in the short term for a few months. We don't know how long it's gonna last. And because it's a very small study, I wouldn't speculate beyond that point except to say that I believe that there will be immunity to this particular virus, but it's never going to leave us completely. We're gonna have to deal with it on an annual basis. It's going to be like measles, and we need to think about, you know, getting people ready for the idea that we are going to have to do vaccinations, because, as you know, there's been a there's a population which is not insubstantial in this country that doesn't believe in vaccinations. Scott, what about you, how do you hope this will end, and any final thoughts from you from a screenwriter's point of view were still very much in the first act of this of this particular story, you know, the next two acts. Um. You know, I'm not I'm not going to write anymore than any other person in our society. We're all going to write the rest of this movie together. And if we listen to experts and if we really can overcome our tribalism and understand our obligation to each other, it can be an incredibly unifying moment, you know. I mean it may sound very corny, but you know, our love for each other is one of the things that we can do to help beat this um. And if people take their responsibility to their fellow citizens seriously, the movie has one kind of an ending um And I think you know, we're going to have to turn our society on slowly. It's not going to be a light switch change at the end of April, and people are going to have to listen again about what sectors can slowly come back um and get more robust than others. Are going to need to spend time figuring out ways, and with those ways, there will be other you know, there'll be responsibilities and things we have to do. Um. So that's that's the version of the story, UM, that I really hope happens. Um. You know, we have everything we need to make that story happen. You know. The other the other version I really don't want to contemplate. One of the things that Scott has done is a project that um we talked about that's just coming on, it's just going online, was a series of vignettes because we're trying to educate people using contagion as a tool as our way of flattening the curve. Well tell us about that, Scott. One of the things that um, we all felt that the heat at the at the end of the movie, you know, both myself and Stephen and the cast, was we really really understood what public health meant and that you know, it's our responsibility to each other and we don't really ever talk about that that this is actually one of the opportunities we have as citizens to work on a problem together and to express our concern, our compassion, and our love for each other. And it's really simple. It means, you know, when you take care of yourself and when you're responsible, you're taking care of the people around you. Um. So. I had had a conversation with Larry Brilliant a couple of weeks ago, and he said to me, do you think there's any way you could get the cast together and and maybe right um some public service announcements because the movie, you know, has had a lot of traction lately. And everybody in the cast who I've reached out to so far, um has been eager to film themselves at home. Nobody has any makeup on um. Everybody is sheltering in place. Hi, everybody, Uh, this is Matt Damon. Um. So. A few years ago, a bunch of us did this movie called Contagion, which we've noticed is creeping its way back up on the charts on iTunes for obvious reasons, given what we're all living through right now. Um and So, the Mailment school of things as fundamental as washing your hands. The way so it works is that one end of the so molecule finds with the water and the other end finds to the grease on your hands. What social distancing really means. It means stay six ft away from another person. It means not gathering in groups, and it means staying home or sheltering in place, if that's what government officials are telling you to do. About how a pandemic um is everywhere, but it's not everywhere once. So if it's not where you live today, you can bet that that's going to change. And if you don't know anyone who's sick yet, you can also bet that that will change as well. So, uh, we all self record, you know, they self recorded these scripts that I wrote, and they are online at UM the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. You know, every day, because you know, some people know that that I wrote this film, I get emails with question marks, and I get sent theories of where this came from and conspiracy theories and theories of cures, and you know, it becomes something for everyone to utilize for a host of other agendas. UM that you know, I think most of the time my inclination in the world is to say, you know, people are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe. It's not that simple, right now. You know, when people don't believe in science and they question, um, you know, the the expertise of people like like Anthony Fauci and Ian or Larry brilliant, and they cast dispersions on them. It isn't it isn't a small problem. You know, these are the people who know the most about it, and because it is a novel virus, there's information that they don't yet have that takes time. And it scares me um beyond almost anything if we start to lose our respect and our confidence in in the empirical method and in science, because it is the best tool we have right now to get us through this. You know, science scientists and experts in these moments are our heroes. You can check out all of those contagion inspired p s a s by the way, by going to Control the Contagion dot org. Those p s a s were written by Scott Burns and created by the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and we encourage you to spread the word on your social media channels. You can use the hashtag control the Contagion. I'll be doing the same, so make sure you follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest. Before we go, I wanted to leave you with a moment of kindness. This one comes from a listener named Suzanne Curry, who shares how the St. John's church and Barrington, Rhode Island is connecting with his congregants during this time of social distancing. They had a virtual happy hour last Thursday at five o'clock and that was my mom's first Zoom call. She's eighty one years old and I helped her with it. And then they have had church virtually on days at nine am. They were broadcasting it live on Facebook. And then they did a zoom last Sunday and it was very helpful. Thank you so much, Susanne, and good for your mom for getting on Zoom. And you guys can keep sending your moments of kindness or connection, the ones that you've witnessed or experienced. Just leave your name and a detailed message at eight four four four seven nine seven eight eight three. That's eight four four four seven nine seven eight eight three. You can also email me at info at Katie Currect dot com. Just put kindness in the subject line and that does it for this episode of Next Question. To get the most accurate and up to date information on the coronavirus and how to keep you and your family say during this pandemic, make sure you go to the CDC and the World Health Organization websites. You can also check out my morning newsletter, Wake Up Hall, where we're diligently reporting on the day's most pressing news. You can subscribe to that at Katie currek dot com. The next few weeks maybe the hardest, as the number of infections are expected to peak. You can do your part by staying home, keep washing those hands, check in with neighbors and loved ones from a safe distance or virtually, of course, and and stop touching your face days. I know we can get through this together. Until next time and my Next Question, I'm Katie Couric. Thanks so much for listening, and stay safe everyone, Next Question with Katie Kurik is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Curreic Media. The executive producers are Katie Kurik, Courtney Litz, and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Our show producer is Bethan Macaluso. The associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clements. Editing by Eric Clements, Dylan Fagin and Lowell Berlante, mixing by Dylan Fagan. Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more information on today's episode, go to Katie currek dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Currek. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric, and welcome to next Question. In this unprecedented time of the coronavirus pandemic, many of us are cooped up on edge, full of anxiety about our upturned worlds and fearful that family, friends, are ourselves could succumb to this virulent bug. And yet a lot of people are finding comfort in a surprising source, Steven Soderbergh's two thousand and eleventh thriller Contagion. A mysterious and highly contagious virus crosses continents in a matter of days and kills Gwyneth Paltrow within the first eight minutes of the movie. What happened to her? What happened to her? The result citywide lockdowns, panic driven looting, spreeze, and mass graves. And without a vaccine, we can anticipate that approximately one in people on the planet will contract the disease. When I recently rewatched the movie, like thousands of you according to social media and the iTunes charts, I was struck by how familiar it all seemed, from the rapid spread, to the government's controlled messaging, to the social distancing and a public growing more frightened by the day. I do think in times of you know, anxiety and panic, people turn to popular culture to enhance their understanding of what's going on. Scott Burns is a filmmaker and the screenwriter of Contagion, and he said, though the movie seems prescient now, if you talked to any one of the experts he consulted with ten or twelve years ago, they would have told you the very same thing, that it was a matter of when and not if we would encounter exactly what we're encountering. So I believe in science, and I think of people who I worked with are extraordinarily dedicated scientists. So um, I'm not surprised, which leads me to my next question. What kind of movie about a pandemic teach us about the real thing? I was lucky enough to spend a little bit of time, from the comfort of our own homes, of course, with not only Scott Burns, but also one of the lead consultants on the film, Dr Ian Lipkin, a k a. The Virus Hunter. Yes, I'm me a loopcoun my professor at Columbia University, and I worked closely with Scott in developing the concept of the film. Before we talked to Dr Lipkin about his reaction when you approached him to be a consultant on this film. What piqued your interest initially, Scott in tackling this in the form of a feature film. Steven Soderberg and I had just completed doing another film with Matt Damon called The Informant and we were actually um on our way home and he said, what do you think you want to do next? And I said that I want to do a pandemic movie that is entirely science based. I had seen Outbreak when I was growing up, like a lot of people, um, but I wanted to do one that was, you know, more of the moment and really looked at a pandemic as sort of a tracer bullet through our society. So you decide you want to put your lens on this topic and you want to do as much research as possible. How were you led to Dr Ian in terms of his knowledge on the topic, Well, The informant Um and a movie I had done before that. I had done with a company in l A called participant Um, which is owned by Jeff Skoll, and Jeff Um has a philanthropical arm to his company and they focus on a variety of threats to the world. One of them was pandemic illness. And because Jeff and I knew each other, when he found out, I wanted to, you know, to write that as my next movie. He insisted that he be involved in his company and be involved because it was so central to their mission. And uh, Jeff introduced me to Dr Larry Brilliant, who was an epidemiologist in the Bay area. Um and and Larry was my first point of contact, and he was part of a team, you know, along with d. A. Henderson, that helped eradicate smallpox in the sixties. Um and I had lunch with Larry, and like I said, he was one of the people who said, it's really a matter of when and not if. And he told me that he thought the best barologists in the world was was Ian Lipkin. And he helped me get a meeting with Ian. And when I sat in the end's office, the agreement that we made was that this was only worth doing if the science was authentic. Um and we began to talk about the limitations of what that might mean to a story, and it became clear to me in talking to Ian that when you look at the complexity of nature, and when you begin to understand what viruses are um, you know, sadly there really are no limitations. Dr Lipkin, when you were approached by Scott, what did you think of the notion of turning this into a movie. Ironically, there were two independent filmmakers who approached me one day after the next in the same location to talk about making a pandemic movie, and Scott was the first. I met the second individual who wanted to make something that was going to look like Outbreak, which was an unrealistic, a very entertaining film, and I came back to Scott and I said, let's do this. From the very beginning was clear that what Scott wanted to do was to educate as well as entertain, so that this would have an impact. So we had a great deal of fun deciding what the virus would look like, what the various components would be of storyline. He understands obviously narrative, and what I was trying to do is to provide the scientific underpinning for what he wanted to do, and then periodically to provide a sort of a list of things that I thought were critical to convey, which he would then weave into the story. So it was a very, very interactive process and a great deal of fun. I was going to say only a virologists would describe that as a great deal of fun, Doctor Lipkin. And when when you talked about what was critical to include in the plot, and then Scott, I want to ask you about how you did this monumental research because you did it, I understand for three over three years. But were some of the things that you wanted to ensure would be featured in the movie, Dr Lipkin. From the very beginning, we want to emphasize the point of one health, the idea that infectious agents emerge in wildlife and then move into humans. We wanted to understand the factors that contribute to that and what can be done for risk reduction, and the sorts of things we identified then I have played out here. We wanted to talk about the challenges and finding ways to identify an infectious agent, the political interactions which can interfere with progress and sign it's which he covered extremely well. The social unrest that was associated with people who come out of the woodwork promising various false panases. We'd begun to see those here too. And then the implications of such an outbreak for social structure, loss of life, how we respond, and ultimately how it all resolves. One positive thing emanating from this, Dr Lipkin is, in recent years science has been treated with skepticism and even hostility by many people, not only in this country but around the world. Do you think this will win back some of the I think much needed and much an appropriate respect for the scientific community. I hope so. UM. When the movie first came out, there was a big uptick and applications for training at the CDC in the Epidemiology Intelligence Service. We think, you know, as I look right now at the number of applications we're receiving at the School of Public Health of Columbia, despite the fact that we're shut down, there are people are writing asking how can they join, how can they be helpful, what can they do? So it is having an impact in that respect. This trend to not believe science or to dismiss it, uh, must be disconcerting to you. It is one of the large challenges we have is that people think that their ways to shortcut, for example, with clinical trials, and it's very important that we have appropriately controlled trials otherwise we get to the end of a trial and we don't know what works and what doesn't, and we subject people to expense and risk that's really unjustified. Um. So another example of that is vaccines. People have this notion who don't understand how vaccines are trialed and proven, that we can just roll out of vaccine in a few months time, and it's just not true. It's critical that the leadership on which we rely at the very top of the regional and state and federal governments respect the people who are trying to give them the best information that they can. So the President has excellent people in the director of n I I D. Tony Fauci and and um, you know in the new head of the of the Task Force, Deborah Burkeleum. But sometimes they appear to be sidelined. And this is unfortunate because some of the drugs that are proposed haven't really been proven to be a use. Maybe they will be, and maybe they want um. So it's important that we do this in the stepwise and the logical fashion so that we minimize the risk of people when we come back will isolate the moments in the movie that nine years later seems so real contagion, of course, isn't just about the spread of a new virus. It's about the spread of information about how narratives around public health are created, who creates them, and how they're disseminated. And it's this behind the scenes element of the movie that's so uncanny to watch today. Pretty early in the film, we're introduced to Kate Winslett's character, an epidemic intelligence officer with the CDC who's been dispatched to Minnesota where there's been a cluster of an infections and deaths. She meets with the heads of the Minnesota Department of Health to evaluate the situation and determine the public response and how's the public going to react to that. It's hard to say plastic shark in a movie will keep people from getting in the ocean, But a warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes when we're going to need to walk the government through this before we start to freak everybody out. I mean, we can't even tell people right now what they should be afraid of. We tried that with swine food, and all we did was get healthy people scared. That's really eerie, Scott listening to that dialogue. Yeah, well, um, you know, when I went to CDC, you know, one of the things that I learned early on is that we have fifty different state health departments and you know, within those states, they all operate differently. And one of the tricky parts of this, and we're certainly seeing it, is you need a coherent sort of program because without that, you know, you get this patchwork going, and a virus doesn't really care about a state border, um, and so much of you know, there's so much interstate travel and commerce in this country, and then you know there's the entire globe, and so until you have a consistent federal program that tells the states how to act, and that it's embraced by the state's governors, regardless of their political orientation, we're very, very vulnerable. And it's tricky to explain to people who don't have a background in these things how how they proliferate. And that's what I was trying to do in that scene, is is think about if you're someone who is sent to a state to tell them, you know what's going on, Um, you know what the resistance is. You're going to meet just from the officials, not to mention from the general public. So at this point, I think we have to believe this is respiratory maybe fall mights too. What's that it refers to transmission from surfaces. The average person touches their face two or three thousand times a day, two or three thousand times a day, three to five times every waking minute. In between, we're touching door knobs, water fountains, elevator buttons, and each other. Those things become mights. The only pushback we had from the Minnesota Department of Health was that they said, nobody needs to explain to us what a foam might is. And my defense of that was, well, we needed a teachable moment and we had to do this, unfortunately at your expense, but somebody had to be Somebody had to explain what an or not was. That wasn't part of what you were talking about there, but which is the transmissibility in text and what full mights are, so that we could get that point across that said, this is a um. This is a harbinger of what came to be recently because it turns out that FOAMT transmission is extremely important with this infection. This virus persists on surfaces for up to three days, and so the opportunities for transmission are much greater, and they are with many respiratory tract infections. So we have say, as you said at the very beginning, Katie, this is eerily prophetic. But so many things in the film are, which I think is really a testament to Scott's imagination and somehow managing put it all in there. What about the battle that we heard unfolding between Kate Winslet's character and all the considerations about how transparent you should be. It's the biggest shopping weekend of the year. I think we need to consider closing schools and who stays home with the kids, people that work at stores, government work as people that work at hospitals. When will we know what this is? Have you seen those factors being brought to bear, Dr Lipkin in the current pandemic. Three weeks ago, I had a conversation with a very high level official, elected official where we talked about closing schools, and I said that I thought this was something that we should do. And the response that came back from not only this elected official, but also the individuals who were advising this official, was that there was going to be no way to feed the children who depended on schools for their breakfasts and for their lunch. And then when these children went home, their parents were going to have no way to take care of them, and the grandparents who frequently assigned to take care of these children might become infected because these kids would carry back this virus from the community into their houses. And I said, I understand all of things things, but if we don't do it now, it's going to get worse. And ultimately, of course, this is what we've done. We've had to close all of these schools. We need a national policy, we actually need an international policy. But if we just stick naturally for a moment, we need to have a way in which everybody understands that this is what we're going to need to do for some period of time. And I think that period of time is probably six weeks, maybe eight weeks. But we have to enforce it rigorously if we're going to get out of this. Were you disappointed with the both the response at the federal, state and local level to this pandemic? Very much so? Um I came back from China the first week of February, and it was clear to me that we were headed for a very difficult situation. I managed to speak with a number of people I know quite well. One of them is the mayor of Chicago, who's an old family friend, and she took things very seriously, but she was unable to do much of what she wanted to do. And here in New York, as you know, UM, there's been a struggle between the city and the state, upstate and downstate in terms of kinds of responses that we're willing to entertain. I think that we should have closed things earlier, and I think that that would have made a difference, But we'll never know. What about the federal response. Dr Lipkin, Well, the problem in talking about the response at the federal level is that I don't want to discourage cooperation. I think there are many things that the President has done that I think I've been extremely helpful. I think that some decisions about closing borders, for example, uh two people who are coming in from areas where they were concerns, we're very very useful. I was very concerned when I heard that he was proposing that we opened everything up. I he's served because I think that would be too soon. But he's now back off and and I'm very appreciative that he's done that. I think that's important. Why do you think people did not take the potential threat seriously? In this kind of work, you're a victim of your own success. If you're proactive, if you prevent an outbreak from taking hold, then nobody really knows about it. You've been successful, but there's no you know, it's not like you store up goodwill and resources so that you'd be ready for the next one. The feeling therefore is that it's really not going to happen, and people become somewhat complacent. After nine eleven with the anthrax attacks, there was a lot of interest in jump starting the biological research that we do into emerging infectious agents and bio defense in general, and there was a program set up which is one of the first places I worked with Larry Brilliant closely. It's something called the National bio Surveillance Advisory Subcommittee's a very long name, but our objective was to try to figure out how prepared we were to get the information needed so that we would be able to respond in real time in the event or emergency. One of the things we learned and that was established under under George Bush was that UM, there was a lot of duplication within the government, we could become more efficient and more effective if we were to synchronize the integrated efforts. And then the second version of that which was under Obama, I shared with the Jeffrey Engel from North Carolina who was in the Department of Health. There that group came out with a very similar set of recommendations to the first group and UM and then that committee was disbanded and to my knowledge it's not been reconvened, and I don't know that ever will be convened. So without that committee in place in the White House providing real time advice to the people who need to make decisions, it's very difficult to see how we're going to get out of this. When we have financial crisis, we have a fit right which responds and tries to make decisions and has some autonomy. We don't have that. In public health. We have very very good people like UM, you know at n A h h h S and I think the Secretary of h h S is also excellent, but they are purely advisory and if people don't listen to them, UH, then there is a there's a risk and in this case, a price to be paid. Scott, I thought we might explore the behavior of this virus through your film. Matt Damon, who is the protagonist, is immune to this. If I'm immune, can't you use my blood to cure this? Blood serums can take a long time to make and are very expensive. But the good news here is that you're not going to get sick. Tell me how you were able to establish him as a character and why that was so important to the plot of the film. Um. Well, he's Matt Damon and nobody wants to see him die. Um, So that part was easy. No, there you go. You're going all Hollywood on us, Scott. One of the things that he and I discussed is that humans are all very different, and we're seeing it with this virus as well, and that people you know who have underlying conditions may have one experience, people who are of a certain age may have another. UM, And that you know in the film, Matt's character is exposed um, but doesn't get sick. Um. And I think that that's an important thing for us to remember at this moment in in time, is that you know that humans have seen pandemics before and that, you know, we survive and we have remarkable immune systems. Um. You know, I think that that that's something that people should celebrate. We're we're pretty you know, incredible animals. Everyone has a different experience, and just as in history there's a typhoid mary um who can spread a disease, there are also individuals who seem to be resistant and we can learn quite a bit from them. Dr Lipkoln there are Matt Damon's running around who are seemed to be immune to this virus UM. I think that as we learn more about this pandemic, we're going to find that the majority of people who are infected have only mild disease or no apparent disease whatsoever, and there are ways in which we can sort this out. It's not going to help us in the short term, but in the longer term I think it will. I think what we're going to find is that the majority of people who are infected with a virus don't have symptoms or have only mild symptoms of the disease. They are nonetheless capable of infecting other people, particularly people who are vulnerable because they have underlying medical conditions. Obesity, hypertension, diabetes, or they simply happen to be older. Right, and if you're a smoker, very good time to stop. Well. I've heard of cases where seemingly healthy people who haven't smoked for decades are succumbing to this disease, or people who have never smoked in the first place. Um, have you been able to understand why somebody healthy in their thirties or forties seems to be affected? Is that the level of virus they're coming into contact with or could it be an underlying condition they just don't know about. I think either of those is possible. I mean, there aren't people who probably do get a larger dose of virus than others. Uh, And they're probably people who are even a compromised but don't realize it, either because they're not getting sufficient sleep, or because they're malnourished, or there's something about which they're not aware. There may also be genetic factors that we don't yet understand. All of this is understudy now in many institutions. We should say it's somewhat of a cruel irony that you yourself dr lipkin as you stifle yet another cough has been you've been diagnosed with COVID nineteen. How do you think you got it? And how are you doing well? There? There is a concern initially because we do work with the virus in our laboratory, that I might have become infected there, but in fact the virus work is not something I had been anywhere near UH for several weeks, and we didn't even open the virus that we're using as a sample to grow the stocks or using for our work now until after I had already left the LAMB. So my case was a community acquired I traveled through China without any difficulty, never never got infected there, and I got infected here in the community. This is now a community acquired disease and it's very easy for anyone to get it. And one of the reasons why I talked about the fact that I was infected was to make the point that if I can get infected, knowing what I do, know, anybody can get infected. This is a disease that there's a risk to us all. Can you tell us what the symptoms have been for you with coronavirus. Yes, I had an upper respiratory attract infection that was not COVID that proceeded this UH, and I was recovering from that. I felt like I was doing quite well, and then suddenly I developed a sort of a nonproductive cough and a fever and then a splitting headache. And I never got headaches, and I had that, and I knew that something was different. So I went into my UH, not into the laboratory, but I drove to the laboratory and I took swabs and I handed them off to my team because we have tests for all of these things. And they called me up and they said, you have an enormous amount of virus and so far one of the highest viral loads we've seen. So I've been recovering from that, and I wish everybody, well, this is not something that you're gonna want to get. It's tough, particularly in my UH people my vintage. You're older, but you are you are on the men because some people say they feel better and then they their health sort of goes down downward, and then they feel better again. So where are you on this side of day eleven? So I'm I feel like I'm truly on the mend at this point. It's it's a slow process. But yesterday I walked. Two days ago, I walked a mile, yesterday a mile and a half. Today I'm going to do two. And I'm going to get back into get back into shape as quickly as I can. There's an enormous amount of work to do coming up. How our pandemic nightmare might end. That's right after this spoiler alert everyone. By the end of Contagion, the heroic scientists working against the clock are able to develop a vaccine for the movie's fictional pathogen called M e v one. And let me tell you, by the end you'll need a little good news. This vaccine as a result of the courage and perseverance of a remarkable few, we shall now begin the drawing. John. Yeah, first, M e v one vaccination. Are those people born on March I almost cried at the end for my appreciation of the public health system, but of science and medicine in general. When you see those people standing in line waiting for the vaccine, it reminded me of when I was, I think, in kindergarten and they used those little sugar cubes. Um I think was it was that a polio vaccine I was getting at the time. Well, I remember that very well, these little pink sugar cubes that they gave to all the kids. Do you think this will end with the vaccine? Do you think it will end with these drugs that help people once they've been infected. How do you see this whole saga ending. The vaccine is going to be the definitive end for this challenge to public health. During the interim, we're going to be able to chip away it's some of the morbidding mortality using plasma therapy and drugs that are in the process of being discovered and developed. In the short term, the key is going to be the social distancing and testing that allow us to ensure that that the isolation is working. And that's really where I think the folks, the folks I need to be now on the social distancing and and the use of plasma therapy to treat people who are sick or exposed while we continue to work on the vaccine. And I want to just recap what Tony Fauci continually says, which is that the vaccine is not around the corner. It's six eighteen months. So this is going to be a marathon, and the American people need to be prepared for that and rise to it like they have for every other challenge we've had since our inception. Do you believe that once people are infected, they will have immunity to the virus or is that a big question mark still? I think it's a I think it is a question mark there. The evidence that we have from very small animal studies with non in primates, with Reese's monkeys is that there is at least part at least there's immunity in the short term for a few months. We don't know how long it's gonna last. And because it's a very small study, I wouldn't speculate beyond that point except to say that I believe that there will be immunity to this particular virus, but it's never going to leave us completely. We're gonna have to deal with it on an annual basis. It's going to be like measles, and we need to think about, you know, getting people ready for the idea that we are going to have to do vaccinations, because, as you know, there's been a there's a population which is not insubstantial in this country that doesn't believe in vaccinations. Scott, what about you, how do you hope this will end, and any final thoughts from you from a screenwriter's point of view were still very much in the first act of this of this particular story, you know, the next two acts. Um. You know, I'm not I'm not going to write anymore than any other person in our society. We're all going to write the rest of this movie together. And if we listen to experts and if we really can overcome our tribalism and understand our obligation to each other, it can be an incredibly unifying moment, you know. I mean it may sound very corny, but you know, our love for each other is one of the things that we can do to help beat this um. And if people take their responsibility to their fellow citizens seriously, the movie has one kind of an ending um And I think you know, we're going to have to turn our society on slowly. It's not going to be a light switch change at the end of April, and people are going to have to listen again about what sectors can slowly come back um and get more robust than others. Are going to need to spend time figuring out ways, and with those ways, there will be other you know, there'll be responsibilities and things we have to do. Um. So that's that's the version of the story, UM, that I really hope happens. Um. You know, we have everything we need to make that story happen. You know. The other the other version I really don't want to contemplate. One of the things that Scott has done is a project that um we talked about that's just coming on, it's just going online, was a series of vignettes because we're trying to educate people using contagion as a tool as our way of flattening the curve. Well tell us about that, Scott. One of the things that um, we all felt that the heat at the at the end of the movie, you know, both myself and Stephen and the cast, was we really really understood what public health meant and that you know, it's our responsibility to each other and we don't really ever talk about that that this is actually one of the opportunities we have as citizens to work on a problem together and to express our concern, our compassion, and our love for each other. And it's really simple. It means, you know, when you take care of yourself and when you're responsible, you're taking care of the people around you. Um. So. I had had a conversation with Larry Brilliant a couple of weeks ago, and he said to me, do you think there's any way you could get the cast together and and maybe right um some public service announcements because the movie, you know, has had a lot of traction lately. And everybody in the cast who I've reached out to so far, um has been eager to film themselves at home. Nobody has any makeup on um. Everybody is sheltering in place. Hi, everybody, Uh, this is Matt Damon. Um. So. A few years ago, a bunch of us did this movie called Contagion, which we've noticed is creeping its way back up on the charts on iTunes for obvious reasons, given what we're all living through right now. Um and So, the Mailment school of things as fundamental as washing your hands. The way so it works is that one end of the so molecule finds with the water and the other end finds to the grease on your hands. What social distancing really means. It means stay six ft away from another person. It means not gathering in groups, and it means staying home or sheltering in place, if that's what government officials are telling you to do. About how a pandemic um is everywhere, but it's not everywhere once. So if it's not where you live today, you can bet that that's going to change. And if you don't know anyone who's sick yet, you can also bet that that will change as well. So, uh, we all self record, you know, they self recorded these scripts that I wrote, and they are online at UM the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. You know, every day, because you know, some people know that that I wrote this film, I get emails with question marks, and I get sent theories of where this came from and conspiracy theories and theories of cures, and you know, it becomes something for everyone to utilize for a host of other agendas. UM that you know, I think most of the time my inclination in the world is to say, you know, people are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe. It's not that simple, right now. You know, when people don't believe in science and they question, um, you know, the the expertise of people like like Anthony Fauci and Ian or Larry brilliant, and they cast dispersions on them. It isn't it isn't a small problem. You know, these are the people who know the most about it, and because it is a novel virus, there's information that they don't yet have that takes time. And it scares me um beyond almost anything if we start to lose our respect and our confidence in in the empirical method and in science, because it is the best tool we have right now to get us through this. You know, science scientists and experts in these moments are our heroes. You can check out all of those contagion inspired p s a s by the way, by going to Control the Contagion dot org. Those p s a s were written by Scott Burns and created by the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and we encourage you to spread the word on your social media channels. You can use the hashtag control the Contagion. I'll be doing the same, so make sure you follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest. Before we go, I wanted to leave you with a moment of kindness. This one comes from a listener named Suzanne Curry, who shares how the St. John's church and Barrington, Rhode Island is connecting with his congregants during this time of social distancing. They had a virtual happy hour last Thursday at five o'clock and that was my mom's first Zoom call. She's eighty one years old and I helped her with it. And then they have had church virtually on days at nine am. They were broadcasting it live on Facebook. And then they did a zoom last Sunday and it was very helpful. Thank you so much, Susanne, and good for your mom for getting on Zoom. And you guys can keep sending your moments of kindness or connection, the ones that you've witnessed or experienced. Just leave your name and a detailed message at eight four four four seven nine seven eight eight three. That's eight four four four seven nine seven eight eight three. You can also email me at info at Katie Currect dot com. Just put kindness in the subject line and that does it for this episode of Next Question. To get the most accurate and up to date information on the coronavirus and how to keep you and your family say during this pandemic, make sure you go to the CDC and the World Health Organization websites. You can also check out my morning newsletter, Wake Up Hall, where we're diligently reporting on the day's most pressing news. You can subscribe to that at Katie currek dot com. The next few weeks maybe the hardest, as the number of infections are expected to peak. You can do your part by staying home, keep washing those hands, check in with neighbors and loved ones from a safe distance or virtually, of course, and and stop touching your face days. I know we can get through this together. Until next time and my Next Question, I'm Katie Couric. Thanks so much for listening, and stay safe everyone, Next Question with Katie Kurik is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Curreic Media. The executive producers are Katie Kurik, Courtney Litz, and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Our show producer is Bethan Macaluso. The associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clements. Editing by Eric Clements, Dylan Fagin and Lowell Berlante, mixing by Dylan Fagan. Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more information on today's episode, go to Katie currek dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Currek. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,