operations, Burns’s script is rather deferential to the efforts of virus experts like Lipkin and the workers on the ground responsible for managing an outbreak. (Jennifer Ehle gives one of the ensemble film’s most nuanced performances as a CDC researcher, right up there with Kate Winslet’s epidemic services officer.) In an interview, the screenwriter says he came away from the experience of making the film feeling reassured that there are some very bright people thinking about these matters of public health on a daily basis.
     For his part, Lipkin strongly advocates fixing certain holes in the system pointed out in the film. As co-chair of the CDC’s National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommitte, he and his colleagues called for a list of remedies in a report earlier this year, addressing jurisdictional inefficiencies, lack of data sharing and research, plus the absence of federal oversight. He also argues that although acute bacterial or viral infections get the lion’s share of the public’s attention, we should also be greatly concerned with the role of infections in chronic diseases, autoimmune disorders, and in mental illnesses. Neonatal infections in particular, he says, can have devastating effects in the longer term but don’t reveal themselves initially.