“Is the immune system at the heart of a new incarnation of social Darwinism that allows people of different ‘quality’ to be distinguished from each other?” asks the anthropologist Emily Martin. She believes the answer may be yes. Some of the people in her study expressed what she calls “immune machismo,” saying, for instance, that their immune systems “kick ass.” One person suggested, in Martin’s words, that “people without a good living standard need vaccines, whereas vaccines would only clog up the more refined systems of middle-class or upper-class people.”
