The New Yorker Radio Hour - Atul Gawande on the COVID Vaccine, and Daniel Kaluuya on “Judas and the Black Messiah”

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Atul Gawande, the staff writer and public-health expert, talks with David Remnick about the progress of the vaccine rollout, the new strains of the coronavirus, and whether we will ever take our masks off. And the actor Daniel Kaluuya talks about playing a man many regard as a martyr, in the new film “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Kaluuya stars as Fred Hampton, a young leader in the Black Panther Party, who was shot in his bed by Chicago police in a predawn raid. The actor talked with Kai Wright, the host of WNYC’s “The United States of Anxiety,” about how the F.B.I. and many whites saw Hampton’s affirmation of Black people as tantamount to terrorism. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Biden administration has spent much of its first month in office focusing on how to tame the pandemic. But much of the news is still pretty grim. The vaccine rollout continues to be chaotic and it's plagued by inequities of all kinds. And no less important, new variants, mutations of the virus, are circulating in the world, and we have yet to get a handle on how to deal with them. Atul Gawanda is a surgeon and a public health expert.

And recently, he served on the COVID task force of the Biden transition team, which was disbanded just after the president was sworn in. He's been a staff writer for the New Yorker for many years. Atul, we had the first doses in the United States administered just over a couple of months ago. How is that rollout going? The vaccine rollout, so, you know, at the very beginning, it was, it seemed, like we were all breakthrough and no follow-through. We hit 1.7 million vaccines a day. Basically, the capacity to deliver vaccination has been rising steadily. And around the 26th, we'll have

the presentation of the Johnson and Johnson data on their vaccine to the FDA, which could mean, I think it's likely we'll see an approval within a week after that and a whole new supply chain coming. So where we are on vaccine delivery is in the top five in the world. So I consider us to be starting to turn the corner here. I guess what's so disturbing to me and unnerving is the amount of resistance that we see to vaccines. We have some populations who are very suspicious of government, and for good reason historically. We have the anti-vaxxer movement, which has its doubts, whether either through conspiracy theory or doubts about the science,

we have all kinds of populations and millions of people, if you added up, who are resistant. Why isn't the government, Oprah Winfrey, whatever would be effective on television and radio and on the internet 24 hours a day,

helping make this effort easier? The vaccine definitely has had a level of anxiety, but the actual anti-vaccine attack has been relatively muted. As more vaccine rolls out, and we're past 40 million people vaccinated now, you are talking about a case where people all know somebody who's been vaccinated. They're seeing what the effects are. They're seeing that we haven't seen suddenly unusual deaths or anything like that occurring. And so the vaccine confidence has risen enormously. We now have more than 70% of Americans reporting that if they had the chance to get the vaccine today, they would take it. That is higher

than we've seen, and I think that will continue to rise. There are still a bunch of people who are fence-sitters. Those are smaller in number, but that doesn't alarm me. I totally understand the impulse to say, I am willing, I want to wait. I do think we have. We have a lot. I do think we have clear evidence that getting the vaccine is far better than getting the coronavirus. That is for sure. Yeah. Now, Atul, you just published a piece about Minot, North Dakota, and the drama there and the politics of the public health measures, not just the vaccination itself. Why did you choose to concentrate on that town? What did you find? I got interested in mind because North Dakota,

in the fall, was the state with the worst outbreak, and Minot was in the county that was the worst hit in North Dakota. And I want to understand what is making it so difficult for us to come together and address the crisis. Because in North Dakota, they had not embraced having a statewide mask requirement. And in Minot, the city council took up the question, are we going to be willing to do something as their hospital was pleading for help from being overrun? And, you know, it was raised this question, our democracy has frayed and has it frayed so badly that it can't manage the crisis. There was also a lack of ability to persuade, a lack of connection and integrity somehow between city council members, particularly city council members who wanted a mask law, and ordinary

citizens who were in deep danger and seeing people all around them getting sick. Well, I actually, so, you know, the interesting thing to me is I came away feeling like this was a, this was a success story. It wasn't pretty. There was deep divide. I showcased Carrie Evans, who introduced the proposal for the city to adopt a mask mandate. And Tom Ross, on the other side, who was absolutely against adopting masks. And they were coming from two different worlds. But, you know, as I talked to Tom Ross and other opponents of the masks, there. It wasn't that they were blind to how sick people were. They, you know, Tom Ross knew the first person who died in mind that he became sick with the coronavirus himself. He was worried he would die. But they felt like the debate was all about deaths, death, deaths, deaths. What about all the damage of the response to the virus was their concern, whether it was kids who hadn't been in school for a year, the mental health damage, the rise in alcohol, domestic abuse, and what they felt like they saw as a destruction in their entire lives, making the connection that what we

do now for the virus will help solve all of those problems. Tom Ross wasn't persuaded, and many of the opponents weren't persuaded, but the community was. And they not only passed the mask mandate. But by the end, 90% of people in North Dakota ended up adopting face masks. They restricted their movements. There was strong opposition. You won't get to consensus. But they were able to move forward and actually get the hospitalizations and the deaths down. They got it down, you know, 80%. You recently wrote an op-ed that emphasized whether it's Pfizer or AstraZeneca that all vaccines prevent hospitalization and death due to COVID-19.

But we're also being told at the same time a tool, even once you've been vaccinated, you should still practice social distancing. So do you think public health officials have been making a mistake by downplaying the efficacy of the vaccine somehow? Well, so it's worth pulling these two things apart. And it is hard to grasp that,

on the one hand, these vaccines appear to be evidence so far, you know, almost 100% protective against the worst outcomes of these infections, hospitalization and death. On the other hand, it is not at all clear that they stop you from being infected. And, you know, we don't know if it stops you from transmitting. We are seeing from some of the results in the UK signs that, you know, there is some transmission that likely does go on from people who get infected. And because of the development of mutation, that is a concern, that if we continue spreading such high level, I mean, hundreds of thousands of people who are actively infected with the virus right now, we will need to get to the point

where we've shut down that transmission as well. A simple question. If you're fortunate enough to get vaccinated and soon, how does that do against what we're hearing about new strains and mutations of the virus? Well, so there's two different. stories here, which only makes this story more complicated, right? So half of my answer to you about, like, why are public health people making this so complicated is that the damn science keeps being complicated. So the UK variant, the B117 variant, its doubling time is only 10 days. It's past 5% of all of the infections in Florida. And it is a variant that is 30 to 50% more contagious, which means 30 to 50% more

hospitalizations, deaths just from that, plus it is more lethal. It is more likely to put you in the hospital. And that one is the one that alarms me a great deal. We have a very effective vaccines. Our vaccines work against this variant. Israel is predominantly infected by this variant, and they've had a 94% reduction in infections among people who got the vaccine. So what I think is the single most important thing is getting as many people over 65 or with two comorbidities vaccinated within the next 12 weeks. The second part is the South African variant and the Brazil variant are further mutations that add on to what UK mutation. And those show some signs of potentially evading the vaccine. Now, we have it popping up in small numbers in the United States.

We don't know if it will spread as quickly as the UK variant will. But those are, are clearly going to need vaccine boosters, perhaps in the fall, perhaps in a year from now. Now, guidelines are all over the place in the United States. You live in the Boston area, and in Massachusetts, they just announced a new, and I thought pretty surprising vaccine guideline that anyone accompanying an adult over the age of 75 gets a vaccine too. Why did they do that? Well, so one of the interesting things that happened, and it's happening in many states, which is they opened up to everybody over 75. And a lot of 75-year-olds came in, but not everybody.

For example, in Massachusetts, 200,000 of the 430,000 people over the age of 75 came in and got vaccinated, but that meant the majority did not. And I thought it was incredibly creative that here in my state, they said, hey, bring in one of those folks who are missing and you'll get vaccinated as well. You know, it led to crazy headlines about people offering to pay the elderly $200, and I'll give you a ride to get your vaccine. People are that desperate to get vaccinated themselves. And a lot of anger. You know, I'm going to see a 25-year-old jump the line or people who are connected

and well-off jumping the line. But in some ways, what I really appreciate is the idea that the people with the connections will be reaching out and getting the people who don't have that ability to navigate the system and get them in. and I'm part of running a bunch of vaccine centers, and it's worked. We are seeing a lot of folks come in that otherwise wouldn't have been able to come in or weren't coming in. What do we still need to improve on in this process if we're going to get to anything

like universal or at least near universal vaccination? I think the areas of next opportunity are ones that continue to reduce the barriers. You know, one thing I've advocated for, for example, is we have a crazy billing system in the United States. It's $17 that Medicare will pay for a single vaccine. Setting up the billing systems has slowed down the vaccine operations, sending out the bills, you know, can cost $5 to send a bill for a $17 vaccine. We're going to need to give us to every American. We should get money from the insurers. I would advocate saying, look, the insurers should pay for every member, but send that money to the government.

government, and let's just get rid of the billing part of this. That would simplify the software. We're seeing people being asked to give their insurance card, of course. And then you tell them, well, it's not going to cost you anything, but I want your insurance card. You know how many people don't trust that? All of that can go away. There are many aspects of trying to make the system streamlined that are going well. There's still more that can be knocked out, and I hope they'll continue get at them. Now, the last time we spoke, it was December. And you told me that you think we might return to normal sometime this summer. And given the new information about variants and vaccination and everything we've been talking about, where does your answer stand now?

So it has gotten more complicated. I didn't imagine we would have strains that would potentially evade the vaccines. And we also have the complexity that the trials, for kids are not complete. The studies in kids age 12 and older are going to come out in late summer and the trials in kids age six and up are only starting now. So that means a big part of the population will still potentially be affected by COVID. So, you know, where will we be? My suspicion is we're going to be in a world by end of summer where we don't have have hospitalizations and don't have deaths in the kinds anything like the numbers we've had, we will have it down below flu level numbers. Once we're below flu level numbers, the country is

going to want to throw the mask away. And that's a mistake. Well, I think it's going to be a real debate because if our goal was get to zero, then we weren't going to, you know, that would be the moment when we say everybody get free. But when the goal is now that knowing we're not going to get to zero, it's that we need to be able to get back to our lives. And we're going to have a real debate, even among public health people, about where to draw that line. But I think by the fall, we're going to be, in summer, we're going to be in the thick of a debate about, well, if it's below where flu was, can we tolerate that? I compare it to when we decided. When we decided, we're going to move the speed limit back up from 55 miles an hour to 65 miles an hour,

knowing that was going to be thousands of deaths a year, and it continues to be debated. But, you know, we decided this was where we drew the line, and it was a political decision as much as a public health one. When you say it's going to take a while, at what point can I go to the movies to Yankee Stadium, to take an airplane flight, not with a mask and not be thinking about this all the time.

So this is what makes it hard. I think the most likely thing is this gets beaten down to become an endemic, chronic flu-like illness that circulates, that we will have developed some antiviral treatments as well. I think we will also have discovered that wearing the mask stops the flu, which it did this last year, and any remaining COVID in circulation. and we're going to have some changes in norms where there are people who decide, you know what, it's perfectly fine to wear the mask when I travel

and I'm in places because I don't want to get a cold. I don't want to get COVID. So, you know, we will be in a new place, I think, by the fall. It'll feel much more like normal. And we may well be, you know, commonly wearing masks. Atoole Gawanda is a staff writer and a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He'll join me again soon as we follow the course of the recovery from the COVID pandemic.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Fred Hampton, a leader in the Black Panther Party, was shot in his bed by Chicago police in a pre-dawn raid. He was just 21 years old. The raid was facilitated by an informant, a teenager by the name of William O'Neill, The half-century quest for justice by activists, lawyers, and Hampton's family has revealed the enormous extent of the FBI's role in what happened all the way up to J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had issued a directive that he wanted to prevent the rise of some kind of Messiah.

That was his word, a Messiah, who would unify the black community. In the new film Judas in the Black Messiah, Hampton is played by Daniel Kaluja, an actor you undoubtedly know from Black Panther or Get Out. The film follows Hampton in the last year of his life as he works to found the Rainbow Coalition, a movement that would bring together blacks, rural and working class whites, and Latinos. Hello. Daniel, hello. Hi, how are you?

I am very well. Thanks for doing this. I'm Kai. Kaluya spoke with Kai Wright of WNYC's program, the United States of anxiety. When did you realize you wanted to be a storyteller and an actor? My teachers used to tell my mom, like, he should get into acting. And I realized back in the day, like, my mom actually told another mom. She said, like, yeah, she got me into that to get me off the streets, essentially. It was, you know, you could get sucked into a couple energies, you know.

So on Fridays and the Saturdays and the Sundays are just doing something, you know. And because it was improvisation, you know, it was really scary at the beginning. I was a 13-year-old doing it. And then I found that you could have a career of it. There was people in my class that were on TV, not in my class. There was people in the more advanced classes that were on TV. And I'd see them and I was, wow, like, you're on TV. It's impossible.

Like, what I say is improv is a creative art and acting as an interpretive art. So there's something about improv is like inherently satisfying, essentially. So you just creating something out of nothing. And when it hits, it hits, you know. And I would just really challenge. myself and always would do something different every week. I don't really look at a script for the first three years of me doing acting. So when people gave me words, I was like,

what are you going to tell what to say? It's amazing. And did you ever return to writing? You know, writing plays and whatnot? I got back into the writing when I was 16, writing plays. But I never used to write them down. I used to tell people like, yo, do this, do that. From there, I was formulating ideas in that way. I realized that this was my thing.

And then skins happened and then we was rolling. Right. Rand for some years on British TV, but it was at least a decade before you had a lead in a big Hollywood film, which was Jordan Peel's Get Out. And I don't know if you understand just how much that shook so many of us here in the U.S., like how much your performance grabbed people like me. How'd you come to that role? It's funny because it's like I was in a really, we started, I was in a bad spot in my life. I've got a lot of rejection of the color of my skin.

You know what I'm saying? I would get roles and then execs would come in and say, no, no black leads. So I was in a weird position where I felt like I'd done the time. I realized it wasn't meritocracy, you know what I'm saying? This industry. It wasn't, I was pissed that it wasn't a meritocracy. It was I was annoyed that I believed in it.

You know what I'm saying? Like I was like, man, I believed them. They told me something and I believed them. And so I didn't act for a year and a half and I just dipped out. And I was just like, yo, let me take time. Let me just like figure out who I am. Like, why am I doing this? Why do I act?

Well, I mean, certainly it was just the beginning of an eruption of essential performances from you. So, you know, you play in Black Panther in 2018. And then later that year, you're in Widows by Steve McQueen. And then you follow that up with a lead role in the film Queen and Slim. That was really challenging because it was. It was like, I felt like you'd rarely see characters like that in narratives because he's content. He doesn't want more than what he has. Do you know what I'm saying?

He wants like a lady to share that with, but that's it. And I realized that was a real challenge for me because possibly I wasn't content. And I wanted more than what I have? But what's that communicating about me to me? It's like going, oh, black, Dan, you know, you don't like you don't like yourself or you don't feel you're enough. You feel me? Like Slim thinks he's enough. His life is enough.

I think that's a beautiful thing to say. And you don't really see black people go, yeah, I'm good. Well, that feels like a great transition to talking about deputy chairman Fred Hampton and Judas and the Black Messiah. I wonder, before you read the script, what did you know about the Black Panther Party? What did you bring into this in terms of that history? I knew just not. I wasn't taught a lot at school about it.

Very minimal. It was like a passing comment. And then yeah, I kind of just was taking stuff in naturally, just like dealing with the frustrations of being a young black man in a white country, like, and actually caring deeply about self-empowerment. And I would just be gravitating towards the Black Panther Party's ideologies and philosophies and concepts. If back then, before you made the film, before you started studying, if somebody had asked you, you know, to describe the Black Panther Party,

how would you have described it? people who were uncompromising about protecting themselves is how I would have described it before and did you know about the history of the FBI's role in trying to dismantle the Panthers were you familiar with that history as well?

I was aware of the Black Messiah mandate agenda I was aware of that and I don't know when that came to me but I remember going what though they did what? They tried to do what? I remember that going

floor just as... What about Fred Hampton himself? I mean, you know, I have to say, I imagine any time an actor steps forward to play a notable person like this, it's got to be complicated, right? Because we're all watching and we already have all these ideas about this person.

And in this case, somebody like Fred Hampton, I mean, he really means something quite deep and emotional to many of us. To me, he's literally a martyr in the struggle for my own personal freedom. That's how I see him. So I just wonder how you mentally, how you physically would prepare

or did prepare for a role like that. It was a lot, bro. It means a lot. I went, Shaka King, the director, amazing director. I asked him about the Black Panther reading list. So in order to be a fully fledged panther,

you need to go on six weeks of political education. So I said, what's the reading list? So he sent me the reading list, and I just started reading the books. And I just saw it as like I needed to get into the, before I started looking at Chairman Fred, I needed to get into the mindset. and the idea what they were talking about, you know,

and getting into it from a late 60s point of view as opposed to a 2018-2019 point of view. Because we've grown so accustomed to being poor, we think it's normal for our kids to go school hungry. We think it's normal for us to go to the hospital with a running nose and come home with a body bag. So our job, as a black bear to party, is to heighten the contradictions.

I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to my black people. To my black people. You know, one of my favorite scenes, in Judas and the Black Messiah, it might be when Deborah Johnson, who's Fred Hampton's partner, played by Dominique Fishback,

she catches you listening to a speech. And I think it was Malcolm X. And you're kind of mimicking him, like a kid lip-sicking to a pop song almost. And I got to say, I was really sort of taken back to my own teenage years there, listening to recordings of Louis Farrakhan

and trying to sort of mimic his voice myself. And it struck me that you were performing a performance, performer in some ways who did not consider himself a performer, right? No, I didn't see it as a, I didn't see it as a performance. I think if I saw it at a performance, then I'm engaged with ego, like Chairman Fred's ego. I think he's a student, you know, and like understanding that he really, really did listen

to Malcolm X speeches and Martin Luther King's speeches in order to build his skill set of public speaking. But it's that kind of like he, I don't feel like it would have served me. to see him as a performer because it was very real to him. His want and desire for people to awaken for themselves manifested with those speeches

and the way that he told those speeches. I don't believe I'm going to die no carrie. I don't believe I'm going to die slipping on no ice. I don't believe I'm going to die because I got a bad heart. I believe I'm going to die doing what I was born for.

I believe I'm going to die half the people. I think it was so important to see him as a human being, you know. So everyone calls him an icon and this and that, you know, and he is that. But he's an icon because he's a human being, because he's a human being that love deeply and he loved the black people deeply. That's why he's an icon. And to have access to God's yet, he was 20, 21. 21 years old, it's one of the things that just keeps sticking out to me.

They were so young. They were babies doing these remarkable things. I want to ask you about a scene that doesn't include your character, but I think is really important. It's because it shows the differences between someone like Fred Hampton and Bill O'Neill, who was the FBI's informant, played by Lakeith Stanfield.

The two men, of course, could not be further apart in terms of how they lived, how they viewed the world. And while watching the scene, I wondered how Hampton would have responded to the FBI agent, Roy Mitchell. He's played by Jesse Plain. Clemens. And here the agent explains the purpose of their work to the informant. So let's listen to that. Don't let Hampton fool you. The Panthers and the clan are one and the same.

Their aim is to sow hatred and inspire terror. Plain and simple. Now, I'm all for civil rights, but you can't cheat your way to equality. And you certainly can't shoot your way to it. That, for me, that line is there. It's like seeing the radicalness of their perspective on things. You know what I'm saying? And how they present it in such a rational way. You know what I'm saying?

It's like, oh, the people who lynch black people, The clue clucks can are the same as people who feed kids. This is what we are engaging with. You know what I'm saying? It's like, and I'm like, that one line illuminated so much to me. And I'm like, oh, wow, I didn't see it. Like, because you don't hear that point of view. I don't know, but it's like, I think it's important for us to really dissect.

Like, this is how they see us. The antagonization rooted in white fear and white anxiety, them being named terrorists because they educated kids because they loved themselves because they was uncompromising with that. That was experienced as terrorism by certainly the FBI.

Look at the film. Everyone's looking at O'Neill, but O'Neill was action activated by the FBI. Let's not sleep. You know what I'm saying? Let's not sleep. He was a kid

put in a situation by men. And they said, you either go in prison or you're doing this. But let me ask you this about O'Neill because I've also heard Shaka King, the writer and director, say, you know, he wanted viewers to wrestle with where we each fit in the spectrum between these two people, Fred Hampton and Bill O'Neill, you know, this the communitarian versus the individualist, the socialist versus the capitalist, this brave Hampton versus a terrified, Bill O'Neill.

And I wonder then for yourself, as you were making this film, you know, if Chaka King wanted us to wrestle with that as individuals, did D. Did you have occasion to wrestle with that with yourself? Removed from the film, I can really see O'Neill's position and see the dangers of apathy, you know, the dangers of indifference. You think you're preserving yourself, but you are destroying yourself. I can see that and that, yeah. I have to ask you also before we go about your next project,

or an upcoming project, as I understand it, which at least on the surface sounds to me like quite a departure from all the work we've been talking about. Barney the dinosaur? I understand you're going to produce a film about Barney. Why Barney? Why not? The reason why I fell in love with films, because I've watched kids films. You can really allow really credible messages to go through that because you go to the base and core of storytelling. And what really resonate with me is that Barney said, I love you, you love me, won't you say you love me too?

And people hate him. He never actually taught us like, what happens if that person doesn't love you back? Oh, wow. I just found it really profound. Is it going to be a feature film or a documentary in Wind can we expect to have this? It's a film and it's being built now. So, you know, and that's all I'm saying, Kai. That's it. You've got a lot already. You've got a lot already, my guy.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you so much. Appreciate you, man, bro. Take care, yeah? Thank you so much, guys. The actor Daniel Kalua, he spoke to WNYC's Kai Wright, who's the host of the United States of anxiety. Judas and the Black Messiah

is in theaters now and street. I'm David Remnick. And that's it for us this week. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon-Corbi, Callalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putuguele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfay Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.