On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

But I believed, even then, that we owe each other our bodies.

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.

We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here. Donations of blood and organs move between us, exiting one body and entering another, and so too with immunity, which is a common trust as much as it is a private account.

Herd immunity, an observable phenomenon, now seems implausible only if we think of our bodies as inherently disconnected from other bodies.

Those of us who eschew the herd mentality tend to prefer a frontier mentality in which we imagine our bodies as isolated homesteads that we tend either well or badly.

The concept of a “risk group,” Susan Sontag writes, “revives the archaic idea of a tainted community that illness has judged.”

The poor were enlisted in the protection of the privileged.

Vaccination, like slavery, raises some pressing questions about one’s rights to one’s own body. But as the historian Nadja Durbach has noted, antivaccinators were often more interested in abolition as a metaphor for individual liberty than they were in the cause as a shared purpose.

vaccine resisters saw their bodies “not as potentially contagious and thus dangerous to the social body, but as highly vulnerable to contamination and violation.”

Even the little bodies of children, which our time encourages us to imagine as absolutely vulnerable, are dangerous in their ability to spread disease.

Unvaccinated children, a 2004 analysis of CDC data reveals, are more likely to be white, to have an older married mother with a college education, and to live in a household with an income of $75,000 or more—like my child.

Undervaccinated children, meaning children who have received some but not all of their recommended immunizations, are more likely to be black, to have a younger unmarried mother, to have moved across state lines, and to live in poverty.

The health risks triclosan poses for humans are probably low, but any degree of risk, he reminded me, should be unacceptable in a product that does not do any good.

Though toxicologists tend to disagree with this, many people regard natural chemicals as inherently less harmful than man-made chemicals. We seem to believe, against all evidence, that nature is entirely benevolent.

The wild and the domestic now often seem isolated values, estranged from one another. And yet these are not exclusive polarities like good and evil. There can be continuity between them, and there must be.”

Vaccination is a kind of domestication of a wild thing, in that it involves our ability to harness a virus and break it like a horse, but its action depends on the natural response of the body to the effects of that once-wild thing.

our bodies are not boundaries.”

Our technology both extends and endangers us. Good or bad, it is part of us, and this is no more unnatural than it is natural.

Before long, the procedure would be known by Jenner’s term for cowpox, variolae vaccinae, from the Latin vacca for cow, the beast that would forever leave its mark on vaccination.

When the word inoculate was first used to describe variolation, it was a metaphor for grafting a disease, which would bear its own fruit, to the rootstock of the body.

But the immune system of a full-term infant is not incomplete or undeveloped. It is what immunologists call “naive.” It has not yet had the opportunity to produce antibodies in response to infection.

The purpose of heroic medicine was not so much to heal the patient as it was to produce some measurable, and ideally dramatic, effect for which the patient could be billed.

Believing that vaccination causes devastating diseases allows us to tell ourselves a story we already know: what heals may harm and the sum of science is not always progress.

Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century.

Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity.

We are all already polluted. We have more microorganisms in our guts than we have cells in our bodies—we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

Power is what philosophers would call a positional good, meaning that its value is determined by how much of it one has in comparison to other people. Privilege, too, is a positional good, and some have argued that health is as well.

Disagree

This mistrust, she warns, should not be dismissed, and vaccination rumors must be understood as “an idiom crystallizing valid commentary on broader political experience in colonial and post-colonial settings.”

Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.

The extent to which it is hard to imagine an ethos powerful enough to compete with capitalism, even if that ethos is based on the inherent value of human lives, is suggestive of how successfully capitalism has limited our imaginations.

Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity. For some of the mothers I know, a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seeks to disrupt—a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.

Any infant who does not live in a bubble is likely to find the everyday work of fighting off infection more taxing than processing weakened antigens from multiple immunizations.

If our sense of bodily vulnerability can pollute our politics, then our sense of political powerlessness must inform how we treat our bodies.

When protective impulses are unregulated, they can be as dangerous as they are necessary.

Feeling responsible for everything and powerless at the same time is also a good description, I think, of the emotional state induced by citizenship in this country.

Not all of us think of health as a transient state that we may be exiled from without warning. Some prefer to assume health as an identity.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”

What will we do with our fear? This strikes me as a central question of both citizenship and motherhood.

Evolutionary psychologists describe a “behavioral immune system” that causes us to be highly sensitive to physical differences or unusual behavior in other people.

Our tendency toward prejudice can increase whenever we feel particularly vulnerable or threatened by disease.

Is this why Republicans are racist?

“Treatments for physical diseases, such as the flu, can also be used to treat social maladies, such as prejudice.”

An alien looking down at us from outer space, an immunologist quips, might reasonably believe that we are just transportation for microbes.

From birth onward, our bodies are a shared space. And a failure to acquire all the necessary microbes early in life can have lasting consequences for a child’s health. We are not just “tolerating” the nonself within us, we are dependent on it and protected by it. This would seem to be true, too, of the other nonselves we live among.

the garden in which we work when we are no longer optimistic is not a retreat from the world, but a place where we cultivate the world.

However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other’s environment. Immunity is a shared space—a garden we tend together.