The Vaccine War (2023)

 

The Vaccine War (2023)

Director: Vivek Agnihotri

Producers: Pallavi Joshi, Abhishek Agarwal

Cast: Nana Patekar, Pallavi Joshi, Raima Sen, Anupam Kher, Girija Oak, Nivedita Bhattacharya, Sapthami Gowda, Mohan Kapur

An amazing, amazing movie about the greatest medical researchers of our time, The Vaccine War is nothing short of awesome.

Dr. Balram Bhargava (Nana Patekar), the Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research in Delhi, reads a WHO article about a novel virus that originated in the city of Wuhan, China. He watches footage of people dropping dead, and a mysterious spike in pneumonia cases. A team is assembled to take a strain of it, analyze the virus, and image it via electron microscope. Afterwards, as Italian tourists who happen to be the novel virus’s carriers are found, a sample of the virus is taken from them, and photographed at the Bharat Biotech lab. When the photographing and the isolation of the virus is successful, the virus is named ‘Coronavirus’, from the ‘crown’ it has. Later tests reveal that it is the same kind of virus as SARS-Cov-1, which caused the less severe SARS pandemic, many years earlier.

Soon after being photographed, ICMR starts making a vaccine. Vaccine numbers BBV152A, BBV152B, and BBV152C are tested on hamsters, and after all, BBV152B shows that on a hamster, BBV152B works like a charm, with nearly all hamsters which had that dose administered on them and then catching the COVID disease producing antibodies. After that, the non-human primate testing phase is to be started. Dr. Priya Abraham of the National Institute of Virology, notes that the only monkey they have is old, and cannot be used for the purposes of testing. So, they head into the forests of central India to catch some.

Meanwhile, Rohini Singh Dhulia, a science editor for the newspaper and news channel The Daily Wire, is bribed by a Western pharmaceuticals company’s media division to promote foreign vaccines for COVID-19 and smear BBV152B, now known as COVAXIN. She starts by publishing some very normal news articles doubting India’s capacity to manufacture a vaccine by quoting some cherrypicked figures and data, but later turns to full out pro-Western imported vaccine and anti-indigenous vaccine propaganda. If you wish to know more, watch the movie.

This movie isn’t directly inappropriate, but it is definitely not recommended for kids, as it is VERY heavy on your mind, and forces you to think a lot, mainly geared toward the ‘elite’ class of people, and wouldn’t look out of place as a web series if its ‘chapters’ in the movie were split into 12 episodes and two seasons. The first 6 chapters are about the development of the vaccine, and the next 6 are about the legal battle between Rohini’s newspaper and the ICMR. I mean, for the first time, I feel like an enormous load of thought is being placed on me, as many things are always being presented. Heart-wrenching and mentally straining stories with many morally grey characters are a mainstay of Vivek Agnihotri’s movies, who is better known for the movie “The Kashmir Files”.  I honestly applaud all this representation of historical figures and historic moments, as it’s hard to make a movie from a few points of view and a certain aim when the memories of COVID-19 are still fresh in people’s minds. Still, a thing that I thought was bad was at the end, it just turned sort of jingoistic.

This movie is good in general. I recommend this movie very heavily for people ready to maintain an unbiased view of events, so personally, 16+ is good, as kids wouldn’t understand the movie and tweens/teenagers will react aggressively to quite a high number of things, as they are swayed easily and still trying to know who they are. If you are planning to watch this movie, as of uploading, the movie has just released.

With that out of the way, I wholeheartedly recommend this movie because:

1.      A great amount of research has gone into this movie.

2.      Some scenes are horrifying, and the chilling storytelling will put you on the edge of your seat.

3.      The character development managed in 161 minutes is awesomely portrayed, whereas many other movie series and shows, while lasting for much longer, don’t have a trace of character development.

4.      The movie makes a good job of portraying real people without needlessly dramatizing or flanderizing (reducing them to their most basic personality) them.

5.      Overall, this movie is very well executed. I highly recommend watching it.