Life Imitating Art (Contagion/Covid)

In this episode we’ll discuss the 2011 film Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh and staring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Lawrence Fishburn. It explores, arguably with frightening prescience, the global response to the outbreak of a novel and highly infectious virus, nearly a decade before anyone would think of a virus before a beer when they heard the word “Corona”.

Joining host Jon Roberts are Elizabeth Stokoe, Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University and member of Independent Sage, Adam Kucharski, Professor of Infection Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Heidi Larson, Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science and founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, also at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

A quick note: this episode was recorded in October 2021, pre-Omicron variant and by the time you are listening to it the world situation may have changed yet again. Here we explore what it felt watching this film with a distinctly 2021 perspective when it truly felt like life was imitating art.