Nicole Shanahan and novelist Walter Kirn are joining forces on a new pandemic-themed film that pointedly challenges the public health orthodoxy that dominated the COVID-19 era.
According to the Daily Caller, the project, titled The Rash, centers on a public health professor who dares to question mass hysteria when a mysterious skin condition begins to spread. The character is modeled on current NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, a prominent critic of COVID-19 lockdowns and sweeping pandemic restrictions, underscoring the films clear skepticism toward heavy-handed government responses. Kirn, whose 2001 novel Up in the Air was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring George Clooney, has written the script, while Shanahan will serve as an executive producer.
The Brownstone Institute, a think tank founded in response to the catastrophic fallout of COVID-19 lockdowns, is backing the movie and helping to raise funds. In a late-January fundraising appeal, Brownstone warned that investors are terrified of the topic and Hollywood elites dont even want it made, a telling admission about the entertainment industrys aversion to narratives that question progressive dogma on public health.
Brownstone has also released a pitch deck describing the films creative DNA and cinematic influences. The institute said the movie draws on classics such as Dr. Strangelove, Thank You For Smoking, Wag the Dog, and A Scanner Darkly, all of which dissect propaganda, corporate power, and the manipulation of public fear.
This story draws inspiration from classic and contemporary political thrillers that expose the machinery behind national panic and institutional control. Echoing the corporate cynicism of films like Thank You For Smoking and the paranoia of A Scanner Darkly, the film uses the outbreak as a lens to explore the erosion of truth. Its darkly satirical tone also nods to the sharp critiques found in Network and Dr. Strangelove, framing chaos not as an accident, but as a product, the pitch deck says.
For many Americans who watched bureaucrats, media outlets, and pharmaceutical giants move in lockstep during COVID-19, the films premise will feel uncomfortably familiar. The incestuous relationship between public health institutions and Big Pharma is indeed ripe for a dark satire, especially after years in which dissenting voices were smeared, censored, or professionally punished.
It is hardly shocking that Hollywood wants nothing to do with a project that punctures its own sacred narratives. The industry seems to be allergic to anything novel and interesting, not to mention anything that has a whiff of being anti-establishment, particularly when anti-establishment means exposing liberal pieties cherished by Hollywood insiders, such as the notion that Anthony Fauci was a god whose decrees could not be questioned.
During the pandemic, questioning public health authorities was treated as heresy, even as their guidance shifted and their mandates crushed small businesses and individual liberty while enriching corporate interests. Those who raised concerns about lockdowns, school closures, or rushed mandates were often branded as extremists or a threat to society, a pattern that a film like The Rash appears poised to scrutinize.
If Shanahan, Kirn, and Brownstone can overcome the financial and cultural resistance, their movie could help reopen a debate that the ruling class would prefer to declare closed. Public health and Big Pharma are a great place to start for artists willing to challenge institutional power, and America desperately needs more serious movies, stories, artworks, etc., that challenge the institutional grip over the country rather than reinforce it.
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