Neil deGrasse Tyson Is Inoculating Society Against Lies

Neil deGrasse Tyson, executive producer of new documentary Shot in the Arm (Photo by C. Picadas, copyright Curved Light Productions, LLC)

Diseases kill people. But lies can kill societies. That's the message of Shot in the Arm, the new documentary directed by Scott Hamilton and executive produced by astrophysicist, science advocate, and UT alum Neil deGrasse Tyson.

After debuting at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January, the film made its theatrical debut in New York earlier this month, and now Hamilton and Tyson are trying to get its message about how vaccine disinformation isn't about self-described inquiring minds asking questions but a danger to society from which some people are getting very, very rich.

It's not a film about COVID (although the shadow of the pandemic looms long), as Hamilton began filming in 2019, when vaccine hesitancy led to a massive spike in measles cases in Brooklyn. At that point, Hamilton said, “we thought we had a pretty important film about why there was a state of emergency around measles when measles was almost eradicated in 2000. But when we had to pivot to COVID, we didn't realize we were going to have a metaphor for how important verifiable truth is to a functioning society.”

That's why Shot in the Arm tracks how the disinformation virus of the antivaxxers has turned out to simply be a symptom of a wider problem. “Anti-science is a disease unto itself,” said Tyson, “which leads to the flat earthers, the climate change deniers. There's an entire subtext of a larger puzzle.”

Austin Chronicle: Part of the problem is the Joe Rogan thing of '‘Oh, I'm just asking questions.’ No, you're platforming anti-facts, and the opposite of reality.

Scott Hamilton: It's dangerous and it's lazy, but it's also clever – and we can't leave out clever. It sounds so innocent. ‘I'm just asking questions. Isn't it good to ask questions?'’

Neil deGrasse Tyson: And skeptical. ‘Isn't it good to be skeptical?’

SH: So we have to dig deeper to see they're not skeptical, they're cynical. They're not just corrupt, they're corrosive. So some of the people I call disinformation merchants in Shot in the Arm are not just corrupt, they're corrosive to these institutions of science and democracy and on and on. But they're very clever. We're not going to leave out that they're incredibly clever communicators. They've manipulated things like the iconic David versus Goliath story. They want always to be seen as David against this Goliath of Big Pharma, Big Government, Big Business, big, big, big, big, big, and try and make it seem that, because those things are big and they're small, that they should be trusted.

NdGT: I hadn't really appreciated that analog is, because no one was going to root for Goliath - the big behemoth. The counterpart is Big Business, Big Pharma, Big This, where it's faceless, whereas the charismatic person who's telling you that they're right and all of these institutions are wrong is a one-on-one individual that you can hear and listen to and relate to.

And it runs psychologically deeper than that. It data mattered to us, then television advertising would just show bar charts of their products and how well it compared against others. But they don't. There's always a personal testimony of someone who was touched and transformed or lost weight or whatever. You see that other human being and you react to them – not the data, not the statistics. And as a scientist, we're kind of insulated from that – inoculated, may I say? – because we're trained to be less swayed by the testimony of a passionate testifier.

Director Scott Hamilton mics up former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, with vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez, while filming Shot in the Arm (Courtesy of Black Valley Films)

SH: They have studied that manipulation of excellent marketing, of fear, of a parent's insecurity that you don't ‘know,' falsely, that the MMR vaccine can harm your child. It's an evil, brilliant manipulation of the truth.

AC: It's like when I work with younger writers, and they put, ‘such and such feels that.’ No, it's ‘such and such said they feel.’ Because it’s not verifiable.

NdGT: By the way, when I want to be annoying ...

SH: When he wants to be annoying, not just when he's being annoying.

NdGT: (Laughs) When someone says, 'It's cold outside, ‘I say, 'No, you mean you feel cold outside.’ To declare ‘It is cold’ has no meaning. Come to your own understanding of your interaction with the world, and report on it this way.

SH: I'm trying to get these outdoor heaters banned, at least in California, where it's a 52-degree night, and these environmentalists are sat there with these heaters. Hey, why don't you put a jacket on?

AC: The undermining of empirical evidence is so pervasive. Even the pharmaceutical industry has been complicit in the undermining of expertise with those late night ads that go, ‘If you think that this pill that we just informed you about will help you, talk to your doctor about it,' and they know that a lot of people will go to their doctor, and the doctor will go, ‘Well, it's not contraindicated, and if it gets this person out of my waiting room, fine.’

SH: The only difference is that there is data there, and there's been studies to show what that drug does. There are even those annoying three-minute releases at the end of it. 'If you happen to have, if this happens to cause.'

AC: And it's always over a party scene.

SH: Or making soup.

AC: Obviously it's not just one thing but a confluence of factors, but why do you think we're at this point?

SH: How did we come to this place of disinformation, or distrust in science, of thinking our own research will do the job? You're correct, it is a confluence.

I often go back to Richard Nixon and Watergate, because it was such a level of corruption in our government, done by two journalists that revealed it, that a lot of the people that are fomenting this fear want to present themselves as the David versus Goliath journalist who discovered the truth. That brought a level of cynicism and skepticism about our government that we'd never experienced prior to that.

Obviously, the internet blew it up to be able to communicate and target what you want to talk about. And then I have to go to a lack of humility, and wanting to even check ourselves if we were wrong about anything.

NdGT: Watergate has been considered a watershed in the public's trust in institutions and government, and that just opened the floodgates. Did that make everyone anti-science? I don't think so. But it allowed people to not trust something that they had trusted that was big, institutional, and faceless.

And right now, how is science being taught in the schools? It's a fat book with words bold faced which you will remember because they're important, and you get a test on that, and you're done, and you move on. You're not really taught that it's a process, it's a means of querying nature, it's a way to decide between what is objectively true and objectively false, and not enough people, I think, understood that.

So yes, there was some imperfect communication between the CDC and [Dr.] Fauci and the CDC and the public, I get that. But at the end of the day, the fact that results shift from one week to the next is a feature of a moving frontier of science. And if no one knows that, and someone says, 'Well, you said something different last week than you said now, and therefore I can't trust you or anything you're saying, that's a failure of the educational system.

Find out more about Shot in the Arm, including how to book screenings, at shotinthearmmovie.com.