Preparing for Disaster: UNM Hospital Participates in Region-Wide Emergency Training
By Rebecca Roybal Jones
Truth-Telling
New Public Television Documentary Aims to Dispel Vaccine Myths and Misinformation
A University of New Mexico School of Medicine infectious disease expert is the driving force behind a new documentary that dispels myths, delves into the history and provides scientific information on the importance of vaccines.
Walter Dehority, MD, an associate professor of pediatric infectious disease, worked as a scientific consultant on the documentary, “Vaccination from the Misinformation Virus,” which airs Thursday, July 29, on New Mexico PBS.
He approached local producer/director Chris Schueler in 2017 after he and some of his colleagues conducted research on how films have portrayed vaccines.
“Over the years we found that, in general, the depictions became much more negative in the modern era,” Dehority says. “In the early days – the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s – the movies typically portrayed a heroic doctor or researcher who developed a vaccine and saved everybody's life, stopped an outbreak of a disease or something like that. The vaccine and the medical community were portrayed as the heroes and it was celebrating science, celebrating medicine.”
Vaccination from the Misinformation Virus
Airs on NM PBS on Thursday, July 29, at 7 p.m.More recently, the villain in the films became the vaccine or the medical community, he says.
For example, “The Invasion,” with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is a film about space aliens taking over the planet, inhabiting the bodies of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials, and using the flu shot to distribute alien DNA throughout the entire world's population.
In “I Am Legend,” Dehority says, “everyone became a zombie because of a vaccine that was introduced into the community.”
Armed with the research and his expertise, Dehority approached Schuler, an award-winning filmmaker, with the idea of making a pro-vaccine documentary, and “Vaccination from the Misinformation Virus” was born. The timing was propitious.
“When COVID hit all of a sudden, the need to champion the COVID vaccine became really apparent,” Dehority says.
Being able to get out a documentary like this that I think can help educate people is really important at this particular juncture. It's a way to spread some positive energy out there – and it's not just about the COVID vaccine, it's about vaccines in general, although we do talk about COVID.
“We're in this kind of different weird era where there's a lot of misinformation going around,” he says. “Being able to get out a documentary like this that I think can help educate people is really important at this particular juncture. It's a way to spread some positive energy out there – and it's not just about the COVID vaccine, it's about vaccines in general, although we do talk about COVID.”
The documentary is an effort to educate people about the benefits of vaccines and includes interviews with infectious disease experts, epidemiologists, pharmacists, physicians and other health experts from throughout the country, Dehority says.
“I think we're at a point where we haven't, since the polio epidemic of the 1950s, really been in a situation where we've been forced to rely on a vaccine,” he says. “It's been brought front and center to everyone's attention.
“We’ve become complacent, I think, over the last 50 or 60 years because we now have a vaccine for chickenpox. Most people have never seen measles or whooping cough or tetanus because they've been eliminated because of vaccines.”