Contagion is an American movie released in 2011 produced by Participant Media. The film was "designed as a public health propaganda film to make people fear and better prepare for pandemics."[1]
History
Coinciding with the film's 2011 release, John Brownstein and his team of researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School decided to "think more about the need to aggregate public health information on a scale that wouldn’t be possible by government-run testing." This led to the creation of Flu Near You in 2012, developed in partnership with Ending Pandemics, the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the Skoll Global Threats Fund,[2] and "launched as part of" Contagion's post-release campaign.[3]
COVID-19
In March 2020, the creators of Flu Near You launched a sister project called COVID Near You in order to "track the then emerging COVID-19 pandemic" in the United States and Canada.[2:1][4]
In April 2020, Christina Farr of CNBC wrote that the film’s creators "seemed to see a pandemic coming, and how various countries would react to it."[5]
Participants
| Name | Position | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Scott Burns | Writer[6] | An Inconvenient Truth, An Inconvenient Sequel, Sundance Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), COVID Collaborative |
External links
Moore, K. C. (2020). Readapting Pandemic Premediation and Propaganda: Soderbergh’s Contagion amid COVID-19. Arts, 9(4), 112. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9040112 ↩︎
Who We Are. Outbreaks Near Me. Retrieved August 6, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230806165007/https://outbreaksnearme.org/ca/en-CA/who-we-are ↩︎ ↩︎
Jones, A. M. (2020, April 12). Has someone in your area been tested for COVID-19? A new website lets you know. CTV News. http://archive.today/2023.08.06-164036/https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/has-someone-in-your-area-been-tested-for-covid-19-a-new-website-lets-you-know-1.4892890 ↩︎
Lapointe-Shaw, L., Rader, B., Astley, C. M., Hawkins, J. B., Bhatia, D., Schatten, W. J., Lee, T. C., Liu, J. J., Ivers, N. M., Stall, N. M., Gournis, E., Tuite, A. R., Fisman, D. N., Bogoch, I. I., & Brownstein, J. S. (2020). Web and phone-based COVID-19 syndromic surveillance in Canada: A cross-sectional study. PLOS ONE, 15(10), e0239886. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239886 ↩︎
Farr, C. (2020, April 14). The medical advisors for the movie “Contagion” saw a pandemic coming, but got one big thing wrong. CNBC. https://web.archive.org/web/20230511065332/https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/contagion-movie-advisors-anticipated-pandemic.html ↩︎
Scott Burns. COVID Collaborative. Retrieved July 24, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230724202019/https://www.covidcollaborative.us/team/scott-burns ↩︎
