Utopia and how it has affected the outlook on vaccines and the pandemic: Thoughts of the people

By: Shilah Danglade

Utopia is a show about a group of teens who get a hold of a comic book that tells them they are under attack and that it was their job to save the world.

The show is thought of as affecting the way people think about vaccines because in the show the vaccine wasn't used to help fight against an imaginary virus it was an attack on the people to kill off the population. Another thing that ties into the way it affects the world people say that this show is very insensitive. They say the show is insensitive because of it occurring during a real pandemic. What many people don't know is that this show was here 6 months before our own pandemic. This show also holds the weight of being a remake to the British utopia and people strongly believe it didn't live up to its name The show's timing is in between good and bad depending on how a person looks at it and their preference for certain things. The way the show tied into the pandemic made it seem very real and it helped watchers understand the plot of the show. The show portraying the perfect pandemic which makes it seem ironic because we are currently in a pandemic. The author says that as long as someone is interested in things that have to do with the pandemic they won't find much interest in the show. Moreover, there is an argument to be made that TV has become too responsive to current events.......Six months into the pandemic’s assault on America, television is already deluging us with shallow, remotely shot portraits of life in quarantine that, in their empty opportunism, are arguably far more offensive than Utopia. Five years prior to that, when the U.K. original came out, the world was only a few years removed from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, a novel influenza virus that ripped across the globe, causing nearly 12,500 deaths in the United States alone. But that was a flu; infection rates subsided, and we moved on. Months before coronavirus became a dirty word, before anybody knew how to social distance or had endured a Zoom quiz (or forty), Flynn’s Utopia script was already preparing a tale of a mysterious flu virus, controversial vaccines, school outbreaks and deadly cover-ups. Amazon Prime's new show looks a little too familiar to the current world in which we live..However, they soon discover that the pages of “Utopia” unearth hidden meanings and real-life threats to humanity, such as — wait for it — man-made viruses in the form of Ebola and Zika.

The show’s resemblance to our own very real pandemic was accidental, but it lends it an uneasy verisimilitude, inspiring a few critics to lament what felt like a validation of anti-vaccine crankdom in the era of QAnon. Could that be irresponsible? Even dangerous?

Or perhaps we have always been just as quick to lean on far-fetched narratives to explain tragedy. From the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case of the 1930s, through to the assassination of JFK and the 9/11 bombings, history shows us that when there’s a moment of societal tension, there’s then a slew of conspiracy theories that seek to blame underground organisations, a global elite or certain religious groups. And where conspiracy theories have sprung up, cinema and TV have always been quick to follow.

All of these sources talk about the show utopia and the pandemic and how the show affected peoples outlook on the world and also the outlook on vaccines. These sources also compliment the fact that the author had no clue that there would be a pandemic like the fictional one he created.