No Ordinary Campaign

At 37, Brian Wallach was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)—on the same day he and his wife Sandra brought their second daughter home from the hospital. They went from being a couple only a few years removed from both working at the White House to not knowing if Brian would live to see his 40th birthday.

Expecting to find a system built to help him and Sandra deal with this new reality, Brian instead found a broken and failed system in which doctors told patients to “get their affairs in order and get ready to die,” and patient voices are ignored or silenced in a fractured ALS landscape that has failed to produce a cure or life-saving treatments despite decades of trying.

This is the story about what happened next. A story about patients taking control of the fight for their lives, breaking down walls and breaking through to new solutions.

Bringing their political organizing experience to the fight, Brian and Sandra have moved with astonishing speed to build a patient-led revolution reminiscent of the HIV fight. No Ordinary Campaign follows them as they carve an unlikely path of funding, legislative and community-building successes to remake the future of the ALS fight, even as Brian’s own condition continues to decline.

The film culminates in a climactic sequence where Brian and Sandra rally the ALS community to pass a landmark bill that will unlock expanded access to emerging therapies in the immediate term—remaking the present just as they have remade the future.