When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

–Fred Rogers

**This article contains spoilers for 2011’s Contagion.**

Over the last few weeks, director Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant 2011 film Contagion has become one of the most-streamed films in the world, due to the eerie similarity between its fictional outbreak and the pandemic currently gripping the globe.

Countless editorials have been written about its prescience, and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns has given numerous interviews about a 9-year-old film because it suddenly speaks to our times in a very profound way. Burns has made it abundantly clear that he had no crystal ball. He simply researched the film extensively and all the experts he consulted with told him that what the film presents was just a matter of time.

However, Contagion contains something more powerful than any parallels between the film’s fictional pandemic and the very real one facing us today. There is a hopeful thread running through the film, which makes it a profoundly optimistic work.

Rear Admiral Lyle Haggerty of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (Bryan Cranston), Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), and Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) gather at the CDC for a teleconference with the WHO. (Warner Bros.)

Contagion is a celebration of the heroism of highly skilled scientists and selfless public health professionals who risk their own lives to tirelessly battle this natural foe. As we all sit huddled in our homes, holding our loved ones close, wishing for a speedy conclusion to our current nightmare, it’s worth taking a few minutes to think about all the people out there, fighting on the front lines.

Contagion presents three very different medical professionals who play key roles investigating the virus, and they illuminate fundamental areas of public health.

Kate Winslet’s Dr. Erin Mears is an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She is sent by the CDC to Minneapolis to investigate the victim believed to be patient zero. Dr. Mears traces the victim’s path in the community and puts herself in peril countless times, hunting down and questioning those who came in contact with the victim before she passed away.

Dr. Mears also finds herself forced to educate local officials who have only the vaguest understanding of how epidemics work. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Dr. Mears simply and clearly explains how the virus is transmitted, informing the characters (and the audience) about the danger of touching surfaces because of how many times we all touch our face, unknowingly, every minute.

Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) explains the concept of the R-naught. (Warner Bros.)

She goes on to exposit the exponential way in which a virus transmits, explaining the concept of the “R-naught” – meaning how many people each person will likely infect, showing how contagious it is. This scene, and many others, are grounded in hard science but worded in a way that’s accessible and involvingly dramatic. Scientists were thrilled to see this and have often used the film as a teaching tool.

Later, in what is easily the most powerful and moving moment in the film, Dr. Mears, having caught the film’s flu, finds herself on a cot among thousands of other patients in an armory that has been converted to a makeshift hospital. When she hears the feverish man next to her say he’s cold, Dr. Mears reaches with her dying bit of strength to give him her coat.

The film has no room for sentimentality. Dr. Mears is too weak to reach him. The coat falls to the ground as she passes away. But it’s her attempt, always reaching forward, that has had me in tears every single time I’ve watched the film.

Dr. Mears questions a family member of the first victim. (Warner Bros.)

There is more heroism in that small but impossibly difficult action – in that absolute selflessness – than in 1,000 Marvel movies. It’s the very real heroism of every doctor who has sacrificed their life to help others. It is a profoundly moving moment.

Another of the film’s scientists is played by Marion Cotillard. Dr. Leonora Orantes is a World Health Organization epidemiologist. She is quickly sent from WHO headquarters in Geneva to study the outbreak at what is believed to be its source in Macau. She stands in for the countless doctors who selflessly travel to the heart of these raging biological infernos to gather vital information as the clock ticks.

In the film, Dr. Orantes assembles evidence from interviews with patients in their hospital rooms, and from surveillance video, to piece together the moments of first transmission. It’s a vital task, because only when doctors know the earliest time and place that a contagion was transmitted can they begin to fight it.

Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) works with Chinese authorities to trace the source of the outbreak. (Warner Bros.)

In the past few weeks, Dr. Ian Lipkin, the world-renowned Columbia University epidemiologist known as the “master virus hunter,” who served as a key consultant on Contagion, did exactly what Cotillard’s character does.

Lipkin traveled to Wuhan, to the center of the current outbreak, to offer his assistance to the Chinese authorities. He went there without concern for his own safety because he felt an obligation to put his invaluable knowledge to use in the one place on Earth where it was most needed. Upon his return, Lipkin also spent two weeks in self-imposed quarantine.

Dr. Orantes and her colleagues study information about the first patients. (Warner Bros.)

The film also offers a fascinating subplot dealing with the haves and have-nots of the world. After concluding much of her research, with the epidemic burning out of control, Dr. Orantes is kidnapped by a Chinese colleague, in desperation, and held for ransom. The price? Access to the eventual vaccine for his village.

As the film makes all too clear, there will never be enough vaccine for everyone on Earth to receive it at the same time. There will be a queue, and those in the developing world will find themselves at the end of it. Recent reports that the U.S. president may have tried to secure a potential German Coronavirus vaccine solely for American use, at a price of $1 billion, only drive this point home with crystal clarity.

Dr. Ally Hextall at work at the CDC. (Warner Bros.)

Finally, the film offers us Jennifer Ehle’s Dr. Ally Hextall, a CDC research scientist. Ehle’s masterful performance paints a picture of someone ferociously smart, perhaps lacking a few social graces, but with an iron will and boundless compassion. She works tirelessly to develop a vaccine but also has a profound respect for the ingenuity of her foe.

Ehle has a fascinating scene with her superior, Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), in which Dr. Hextall seems almost excited to describe her discoveries about how the virus operates and how it is mutating. It’s a demonstration of a keen mind recognizing a worthy opponent, and it’s the kind of celebration of intelligence all too rare in pop culture.

At the time the film came out, Ehle told interviewers that her role was beefed up in reshoots after preview audiences demanded changes. As she put it, “Apparently when it was tested, what people – and most hearteningly, young people – wanted was more science. That’s our future, and I think that’s a really good sign…”

Dr. Cheever and Dr. Hextall study data. (Warner Bros.)

Dr. Hextall also gets one of the film’s most movingly heroic moments. When she finally develops a vaccine that works on test monkeys, she finds herself with no option but to test it on herself. She injects herself and then visits her dying father, a doctor who treated patients of the virus long after others gave up, until he too fell sick with it. Dr. Hextall removes her mask and intentionally exposes herself to the virus.

She explains to her dad that she’s doing what countless other doctors have done. Dr. Hextall reminds her father that he used to tell her about Dr. Barry Marshall, saying that Marshall “thought that bacteria caused ulcers, not stress. Gave himself the bug and then cured himself. You taught me about him. I’m testing my vaccine.”

“He won a Nobel Prize,” her father adds as they both smile tearfully.

Dr. Hextall is successful, but on the day of the big public announcement of her vaccine, she refuses to attend the press conference. She is uninterested in acclaim, staying in her lab to do more vital work. Finally, in a triumphant montage, Dr. Hextall takes a sample of MEV-1, the film’s fictional virus, and places it in deep freeze at the CDC, alongside other foes medical science has battled, including SARS and H1N1.

As the far right terrifyingly attempts to make government small enough to “drown it in the bathtub,” it’s worth taking a look at this scrupulously researched film, which plays more like a docudrama. It makes a calm but ferociously impassioned case for a robustly funded federal public health system and cooperation on a global level, coordinated by the WHO.

Scientists who worked on the film have found themselves saddened that they were not listened to in the intervening decade, and the unpardonable lapses and failures of the last few years must certainly never be allowed to happen again.

Many in positions of authority today, both in the States and abroad, may be profoundly dangerous buffoons who have made (and continue to make) calamitous mistakes in regard to public health. But try to look past them. They are just noise. There are good and decent people out there risking everything and fighting tirelessly to protect us.

Have faith. Have hope. Look for the helpers.