By Ethan Cannistra, Staff Writer
The Netflix show Pandemic provides an interesting look at the threat of a global pandemic. The series looks at how quickly a pandemic can occur and how underprepared nations around the world are. However, the series mostly focuses on the threat of a flu pandemic. It also examines the hope for a universal flu vaccine that can hopefully abolish the flu for good. Pandemic is a timely look at the threat of a pandemic and the effect that it will have on countries around the world.
As a result of COVID-19, government officials around the globe are saying how underprepared their countries are for a global pandemic. This is a topic that is heavily explored in the documentary. Most nations have no idea what to do in the event of a pandemic. As we have seen in recent weeks this fact is absolutely correct. As the documentary predicted, most countries are scrambling to produce supplies and control the rate of infections. However, according to the documentary some areas of the world are more prepared than others. The reason for this is that they learned lessons from the Spanish Flu in 1918.
The 1918 Spanish Flu infected 500 million people. This rate of infection is what scares world health experts. The documentary addresses the fact that in 1918 people were not traveling all over the world on a regular basis. This fact is very different now and people can easily travel to different continents. This means that viruses can spread more easily and potentially kill more people. This is something that we are already seeing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The last thing that the documentary looks at is the creation of a vaccine that will protect people from all variations of the flu. This will hopefully protect the world from a future flu pandemic that would kill millions of people. However, there are several factors that prevent this vaccine from being created. One major obstacle is securing funding. Scientists are struggling to convince investors to fund a product for which there is no immediate need. However, the money needed to finish a potential vaccine is minimal. In the documentary one scientist claims that they could finish a universal flu vaccine for under 2 million dollars. Scientists struggling to get funding for a vaccine that could save lives is also something that we have seen recently with the coronavirus. Several scientists have claimed that they could have completed a coronavirus vaccine years ago. However, they never received the funding to finish it because the government did not view it as essential.
Overall, Pandemic is a very timely documentary. This series was produced before the coronavirus was a global pandemic and it proves that scientists knew exactly what would happen in the event of a global pandemic. The show also demonstrates that nobody knew how to handle a pandemic in the modern day. We are now seeing this occur in real time and witnessing governments struggle to control the spread.
