Hollywood actors Julia Roberts, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Hugh Jackman are among the long list of A-list celebrities lending health experts — starting with Dr. Anthony Fauci — their social media platforms as part of the #PassTheMic, an initiative organized by global nonprofit ONE Campaign aimed at promoting “health and economic experts … discussing a global response to” the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Roberts will be the first to relinquish her social media accounts — Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter — to Dr. Fauci. Hollywood stars Hugh Jackman, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Oyelowo, Busy Philipps, Rita Wilson, Robin Wright, Connie Britton, Millie Bobby Brown, Danai Gurira, and others have giving health experts their social media accounts for 24-hours to various health experts. A video has been released to announce the campaign.
Watch below:
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Donald Trump’s White House task force, has become a household name, from joining late-night TV shows to celebrity podcast programs to promote the administration’s message about it’s response to how people should best take care of their health in response to the Chinese coronavirus.
Dr. Fauci even once said he’d like to be played by Brad Pitt in any future movie portrayal of the coronavirus crisis. Saturday Night Live was happy to oblige with Pitt, who played Dr. Fauci in a skit last month.
Watch below:
Just the same, Dr. Fauci has often publicly contradicted the president, for instance on when and how quickly to reopen schools and America’s economy.
Roberts held a Q&A with Dr. Fauci discussing how the developing world can best respond to the deadly virus that originated in China.
“This gets to a fundamental problem that we have to deal with and that is the extraordinary health disparities in the developing world. Right now, in, if you take southern Africa sub saharan Africa, parts of Asia, South America, and even parts of the Caribbean, as areas that don’t have the healthcare system to be able to respond the way one can respond in New York or LA or New Orleans or Chicago. We have really a moral responsibility for people throughout the world. I mean if you’re in the developed world, you know and we did that when we developed a PEPFAR program, we felt that we had a responsibility to the developing world that they should not suffer more or more easily just because where they happen to have been born.”
Watch below:
The #PassTheMic campaign, announced Wednesday, is part of the ONE World Campaign and calls “for a global response to COVID-19 that protects the most vulnerable, supports people worst hit economically, strengthens health systems and creates a more just and equal world.” The “PassTheMIC” social media takeovers will last throughout May and into June.
The launch of the campaign comes on the heels of President Trump’s message to the World Health Organization, warning that it will permanently lose U.S. funding unless it commits to “major substantive improvements within the next 30 days.”
Trump suspended U.S. funding to the United Nations subsidiary last month, as Breitbart News reported, noting then the W.H.O. played a key role in “mismanaging and covering up” the global spread of the deadly Chinese coronavirus.