Do you feel the bureaucratic layers the US places on obtaining FDA approval of pharmaceuticals should be lessened in a time where the well-being of the population is at grave risk? Why or why not?
The film depicts the ways that pandemics and issues of public health are not simply scientific or social phenomena, but issues that are affected by geopolitics. Various state agencies must work together to help mitigate the virus; however, it is often the individuals who are working outside of governmentally-sanctioned structures that affect real change. For instance, the vaccine comes about when Dr. Sussman goes against the orders of the state to identify the cell culture that Dr. Hextall uses to develop the vaccine.
Additionally, we see how politics and global economics play into access to care, when Sun Feng kidnaps Dr. Orantes in exchange for early access to the vaccine, which he knows that his small impoverished village would never receive otherwise. Furthermore, at the end of the film, when we see how the virus originates, we see that the pandemic begins because of human beings' disturbance of the natural world, which displaces the bat the infects that pig that then begins the viral spread. Disease and medicine are as much about politics and economics as they are about science, the film shows us.
