A decade after receiving an Oscar nomination for his documentary “Learn how to Survive a Plague,” in regards to the work of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Energy within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s that led to the event of antiviral therapies for AIDS, the director David France returns with what we would — depressingly — name a sequel: “Learn how to Survive a Pandemic,” in regards to the world effort to develop and disseminate vaccines for the coronavirus.
Not like the retrospective perspective of the 2012 movie, “Learn how to Survive a Pandemic” unfolds in medias res — which, given the immensity of the still-ongoing disaster, is each the movie’s energy and weak spot. In its first half, filmed in 2020, France follows the science journalist Jon Cohen as he interviews policymakers and researchers racing to create and approve Covid-19 vaccines.
Cohen tells his interviewees that he’s assembling a “time capsule” of the second. This chance evokes putting candor in some: Peter Marks, one of many Meals and Drug Administration’s highest-ranking regulators, admits to the pressures he was dealing with beneath a Trump administration that was looking forward to a well-timed win.
The second chapter, which traces the distribution of the vaccines worldwide, has much less investigative heft. Its occasions are too current and unresolved to accumulate the hindsight of a time capsule, and its photographs of hospitals and cremation grounds too acquainted to encourage something aside from jadedness.
Right here, Cohen ventures past the USA — to South Africa, India and Switzerland — to cowl the failure of the United Nations’ vaccine initiative and the unwillingness of producers to launch patents. The message — that science can’t succeed with out a politics of solidarity — is vital, however the movie ends on a observe of uncertainty that feels defeatist moderately than pressing.
Learn how to Survive a Pandemic
Not rated. Working time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms.
