A deep dive into the anti-vaccine movement, Shot in the Arm offers a stark reminder of former US senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan’s celebrated maxim that everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy, who previously earned an Oscar nomination for The Garden (2008), this sobering documentary examines a growing anti-science mentality that was already well established before the Covid-19 crisis, but which gained much more traction during the pandemic, with populist right-wing leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro fanning the flames of confusion and misinformation.
Fresh from its world premiere at Palm Springs International Film Festival, Kennedy’s politely furious polemic is urgent and timely enough to generate interest from further festivals, specialist buyers, public health bodies and politically engaged audiences. Prize-winning broadcaster and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is credited as executive producer, which should provide an additional boost to the project’s credibility and educational credentials.
Blending new interviews, archive footage and personal anecdotes, Shot in the Arm is a diligent piece of factual reportage, though formally a little too blandly televisual, with a message that is hardly revelatory, and a primary focus on the US which could limit its potential global audience. As a snapshot of how viral paranoia spreads in an age of alternative facts, Kennedy’s film is fairly compelling. But whether it has utilty as campaigning journalism is a moot point, since anti-vaxxers tend to dismiss critical media voices as part of some giant shadowy conspiracy between the government and the medical-industrial complex. The film-makers will most likely be preaching to the converted here.
Kennedy began Shot in the Arm before the Covid crisis, when his focus was documenting the measles pandemic of 2019, the alarming global resurgence of a lethal disease once deemed on the brink of extinction. He lays the blame for this growing “vaccine hesitancy” firmly on false reports about a link between autism and the MMR (measles mumps rubella) vaccine typically given to schoolchildren worldwide. Many of these dangerous claims originated with British former doctor Andrew Wakefield, who published a notorious medical paper in 1998 that seemed to suggest a causal connection. The study was later shown to be fraudulent, with Wakefield taking undeclared payments from lawyers hoping to profit from planned legal action over MMR. Despite being struck off as a physician in the UK, Wakefield has since turned controversy into cash, carving a lucrative second career as a prominent anti-vaxxer in the US.
Kennedy interviews experts and high-profile figures on both sides of the argument, though his sympathies clearly lie with the overwhelming expert medical consensus that vaccines have extended the human lifespan by 30 years over the last century. Among his interviewees are Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to both Presidents Trump and Biden, and Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine specialist and member of the US agency Centers for Disease Control. “Science isn’t political, or at least it shouldn’t be,” Offit argues. Kennedy also talks to Blima Marcus, a nurse practitioner who was formerly wary of vaccines, but who now works at educating her own Orthodox Jewish community about their benefits. Another community activist, Karen Ernst of Voices for Vaccine, insists her job is to “inoculate people against misinformation.”
Shot in the Arm is inevitably a partisan film, with little patience for the untested claims and rampant scare tactics that drive the anti-vaxxer movement. But to his credit, Kennedy does give space to some prominent critics of vaccination, mostly in first-hand interviews. One is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (no relation to the director), whose shifty claims of being a neutral player sit uncomfortably with footage of him attending a huge anti-lockdown protest in 2020 in Covid-stricken Berlin, which climaxed in neo-Nazi groups trying to storm the Reichstag. Another is broadcaster and public speaker Del Bigtree, whose YouTube account was shut down in 2020 for spreading pandemic misinformation. Bigtree spoke at a pro-Trump rally in Washington DC that preceded the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The crossover between anti-vaxxers and right-wing mob violence is striking. Indeed, Kennedy builds a case that such anti-science activism is ultimately dangerous for democracy.
In seeking to comprehend the twisted logic that opposes vaccines, Kennedy concedes that some communities are understandably wary of federal government medical advice, citing the long history of crooked lobbying by big tobacco companies and notorious experiments like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which deliberately denied 400 African-American men treatment for venereal disease. More of this kind of historical and psychological context would have made for a a richer and more ethically engaging film. Not all anti-vaxxers are malign online grifters, many are just concerned parents trying to protect their children from harm, their worst fears cynically exploited by fake gurus and dubious snake oil salesmen.
Kennedy brings a more personal, human dimension to Shot in the Arm by incorporating footage of families coping with Covid lockdown, including his own daughters. He ends the film with an online choir of children singing David Bowie’s Space Odyssey, which is sweet but has little narrative purpose. Elsewhere, Tyler Strickland’s twinkly piano score lends the documentary a slightly cloying, sentimental feel. But leaving aside minor aesthetic niggles, this is a worthy and well-made exercise in current affairs film-making. Whether it will change any minds is a bigger, tougher question. Trying to reason people out of a belief that they did not reason themselves into is rarely a successful strategy. This disease may not have a cure.
Director, screenwriter: Scott Hamilton Kennedy
Cast: Blima Marcus, Dr. Peter Hotez, Dr. Paul Offit, Karen Ernst, Dr. Anthony Fauci
Cinematography: Derek Weisehan
Editing: Alex Blatt, Tim O’Neil, Yaffa Lerea
Music: Tyler Strickland
Producers: Mark Monroe, Mark Steele, Scott Hamilton Kennedy
Production company, world sales: Black Valley Films (US)
Venue: Palm Springs International Film Festival
Language: English
89 minutes
