EXCLUSIVE | 'Designated Survivor' showrunner Neal Baer on Covid-19: 'Trump administration has failed'
Neal Baer is one of those accomplished showrunners who can talk in-depth about the coronavirus outbreak. His TV show 'Designated Survivor' starring Kiefer Sutherland has one of the episodes themed around a pandemic ravaging the US. Call it a premonition maybe, but a year later, here we are actually in the middle of a global pandemic. That people have started comparing that episode to the current times was no surprise.
Baer, who also worked on 'ER' and was the showrunner/EP of 'Law & Order: SVU' spoke exclusively to MEAWW where he opens up about the country's lack of preparedness, the failure of the Trump administration to take measures and the possibility of neutralizing the pandemic threat. Excerpts:
What are your thoughts on the current situation we're in right now?
We're in another crisis because the Trump administration has failed profoundly to take measures that would help the country prevent the spread of the virus. So we're reaping what has been sown — lack of masks, lack of preparation, lack of sticking to the science — and we're seeing the tragic results.
You speak of lack of preparedness and that was one of the themes when you chose a pandemic storyline in 'Designated Survivor'...
The idea behind the virus was to do a couple of things. One shows that we haven't as a society really dealt with CRISPR technology and we're not prepared to deal with rogue scientists who might use this technology for nefarious ends. We're dealing with growing right-wing authoritarianism that is really harmful. That motivated us to do that story.
In your opinion, how underprepared are we to handle this pandemic?
It's been written about for many years, particularly by David Quammen, who wrote about it in a book in 2012, talking about the threat of zoonotic diseases. So diseases spread from particularly bats. We have experienced it with MERS, we had experienced it with SARS, we had experienced it with Ebola, and yet we still continue as though those experiences haven't informed us.
And that's not to say that it hasn't informed scientists. It has, but it certainly didn't inform the Trump administration or most of the people who have been advising him.
What are your thoughts on the speculations that this might have actually been a bioterrorism attack?
I think it's been pretty clearly shown there were studies done a few years ago that showed that the novel Covid-19 virus appears to have come from bats. The virus was analyzed and was very close to the one that has emerged now. So I think it's been pretty well disproven that it was conjured up in a laboratory.
These were bats that had been analyzed, the virus had been analyzed, and was very high in the high 90% match with the virus that was found in 2015-17, in the mid-twenties. There are lots of stories that are on the Internet, but that means little in terms of science.
What do you think about shows incorporating Covid-19 as a theme in their shows?
I think we haven't seen those shows yet on TV, so they're just starting to come out, the ones that have been shot since the pandemic began. So we'll see how they incorporate the story of Covid-19 into their stories.
I know when I did the show 'ER', that we definitely incorporated HIV into our stories from the point where it was not treatable when the show first started to several years later when there was a triple cocktail that was effective. So we incorporated emerging science into our storyline.
Is it a possibility to neutralize the pandemic threat like we saw in 'Designated Survivor'?
I think a show can do a lot to promote understanding, and that's what we've tried to do on all my shows from 'ER', 'SVU' to 'Designated Survivor'. So we endeavor to make the information as accurate as possible because we know people get health information from what they see on TV.
'Designated Survivor' Seasons 1 to 3 are available for streaming on Netflix.