On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

WHAT’S THAT?” WAS MY SON’S FIRST PHRASE, and for a long time it was all he could say. As he learned to talk, I learned, in naming the parts of things for him, how often our language reflects our bodies. “We give a chair arms, legs, a seat and a back,” writes the poet Marvin Bell, “a cup has its lip / and a bottle its neck.” The ability to make and understand basic metaphors of this kind arrives with language, which is itself made of metaphor. Plumbing most any word will reveal what Emerson called “fossil poetry,” metaphors submerged below the surface of our current usage. Fathom, a means of measuring the depth of the ocean, now means understand because its literal origin, using outstretched arms to measure cloth from fingertip to fingertip, was once used as a metaphor for grasping an idea.

"Plumbing most any word will reveal what Emerson called 'fossil poetry,' metaphors submerged below the surface of our current usage"…

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. Any given vaccine can fail to produce immunity in an individual, and some vaccines, like the influenza vaccine, are less effective than others. But when enough people are vaccinated with even a relatively ineffective vaccine, viruses have trouble moving from host to host and cease to spread, sparing both the unvaccinated and those in whom vaccination has not produced immunity. This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community. The unvaccinated person is protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which disease is not circulating. But a vaccinated person surrounded by bodies that host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or fading immunity. 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...

Vaccination of humans has made one single virus extinct—the variola virus that causes smallpox. But novel viruses are constantly inventing themselves, as viruses have a special talent for genetic variation. Of all the varieties of germs, viruses may be the most vexing. They are mysterious creatures, parasitic and vampiric by nature. They are not exactly inanimate, but viruses are not, strictly speaking, alive. They do not eat, do not grow, and generally do not live in the manner that other living things live. Viruses must enter and inhabit a living cell in order to reproduce, or to do much of anything. On their own, they are little more than minuscule bits of inert genetic material, so small that they cannot be seen by an ordinary microscope. Once inside another cell, viruses use that cell’s body to make more of themselves. The metaphor of a factory is often used to describe how viruses work—they enter a cell and force its equipment to produce thousands more viruses. But viruses strike me as more supernatural than industrial—they are zombies, or body snatchers, or vampires. A virus can, on occasion, infect an organism in a way that ensures the viral DNA will be passed on to that organism’s offspring as part of their genetic code. A rather surprising amount of the human genome is made up of debris from ancient viral infections. Some of that genetic material does nothing, so far as we know, some can trigger cancer under certain conditions, and some has become essential to ou...

“Perceptions of risk—the intuitive judgments that people make about the hazards of their world,” the historian Michael Willrich observes, “can be stubbornly resistant to the evidence of experts.” We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us. We drive around in cars, a lot. We drink alcohol, we ride bicycles, we sit too much. And we harbor anxiety about things that, statistically speaking, pose us little danger. We fear sharks, while mosquitoes are, in terms of sheer numbers of lives lost, probably the most dangerous creature on earth.

ONE OF THE APPEALS OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE is that it offers not just an alternative philosophy or an alternative treatment but also an alternative language. If we feel polluted, we are offered a “cleanse.” If we feel inadequate, lacking, we are offered a “supplement.” If we fear toxins, we are offered “detoxification.” If we fear that we are rusting with age, physically oxidizing, we are reassured with “antioxidants.” These are metaphors that address our base anxieties. And what the language of alternative medicine understands is that when we feel bad we want something unambiguously good. Most of the pharmaceuticals available to us are at least as bad as they are good. My father has the habit of saying, “There are very few perfect therapies in medicine.” True as it may be, the idea that our medicine is as flawed as we are is not comforting. And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word natural. This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What natural has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is pure and safe and benign. But the use of natural as a synonym for good is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.

THE CIRCASSIAN WOMEN,” Voltaire wrote to the French in 1733, “have, from time immemorial, communicated the small-pox to their children when not above six months old by making an incision in the arm, and by putting into this incision a pustule, taken carefully from the body of another child.” It was women who inoculated their children, and Voltaire mourned the fact that the “lady of some French ambassador” had not brought it from Constantinople to Paris. “What prompted the Circassians to introduce this custom, which seems so strange to others,” Voltaire wrote, “is a motive common to all: maternal love and self-interest.” Medical care was still mainly the domain of women then, though the tradition of the female healer was already threatened by physicians and the Church. Midwives and wise women, guilty of crimes that included providing contraception and easing the pains of labor, were particularly persecuted in the witch hunts that burned across Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. According to the Catholic Church’s official guide for witch hunters, midwives belonged to the class of good witches who healed and did not harm, but this made them no less witches. While women were being executed for their suspicious ability to heal the sick, physicians in European universities studied Plato and Aristotle but learned very little about the body. They did not experiment, did not practice science as we know it, and had little empirical data to support their treatments,...

As far back as the early Middle Ages, female healers had identified effective remedies by empirical and intuitive experimentation while the medical establishment langored in supersticion…

Even a modestly informed woman squinting at the rough outlines of a compressed history of medicine can discern that quite a bit of what has passed for science in the past two hundred years, particularly where women are concerned, has not been the product of scientific inquiry so much as it has been the refuse of science repurposed to support already existing ideologies. In this tradition, Wakefield’s study forwarded a hypothesis that was already in the air, a hypothesis that held particular appeal for women still haunted by the legacy of the refrigerator mother theory. Those who went on to use Wakefield’s inconclusive work to support the notion that vaccines cause autism are not guilty of ignorance or science denial so much as they are guilty of using weak science as it has always been used—to lend false credibility to an idea that we want to believe for other reasons. 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. “Women know very well that knowledge from the natural sciences has been used in the interests of our domination and not our liberation,” Donna Haraway writes. And this understanding, she observes, can render us less vulnerable to the seductive claims of absolute truth that are sometimes made in the name of science. But it can also invite us to undervalue the place and importance of scientific knowledge. We need science, Haraway warns. W...

“He was too pure,” a Baltimore mother said of her son, who developed leukemia as an infant. His mother blamed the pollutants in vaccines for his illness, and herself for allowing him to be vaccinated. Fears that formaldehyde from vaccines may cause cancer are similar to fears of mercury and aluminum, in that they coalesce around minuscule amounts of the substance in question, amounts considerably smaller than amounts from other common sources of exposure to the same substance. Formaldehyde is in automobile exhaust and cigarette smoke, as well as paper bags and paper towels, and it is released by gas stoves and open fireplaces. Many vaccines contain traces of the formaldehyde used to inactivate viruses, and this can be alarming to those of us who associate formaldehyde with dead frogs in glass jars. Large concentrations are indeed toxic, but formaldehyde is a product of our bodies, essential to our metabolism, and the amount of formaldehyde already circulating in our systems is considerably greater than the amount we receive through vaccination. As for mercury, a child will almost certainly get more mercury exposure from her immediate environment than from vaccination. This is true, too, of the aluminum that is often used as an adjuvant in vaccines to intensify the immune response. Aluminum is in a lot of things, including fruits and cereals as well as, again, breast milk. Our breast milk, it turns out, is as polluted as our environment at large. Laboratory analysis of brea...

“If you want to understand any moment in time, or any cultural moment, just look at their vampires,” says Eric Nuzum, author of The Dead Travel Fast. Our vampires are not like the remorseless Victorian vampires, who had a taste for the blood of babies and did not seem to feel badly about it. Our vampires are conflicted. Some of them go hungry rather than feed on humans, and some of them drink synthetic blood. “Almost all of these current vampires are struggling to be moral,” the journalist Margot Adler observed after immersing herself in vampire novels and vampire television for months after her husband’s death. “It’s conventional to talk about vampires as sexual, with their hypnotic powers and their intimate penetrations and their blood-drinking and so forth,” she reported. “But most of these modern vampires are not talking as much about sex as they are about power.” Power, of course, is vampiric. We enjoy it only because someone else does not. 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. Our vampires, whatever else they are, remain a reminder that our bodies are penetrable. A reminder that we feed off of each other, that we need each other to live. Our vampires reflect both our terrible appetites and our agonized restraint. When our vampires struggle with their need for blood, they giv...

Vampires as a metaphor for our interdependence on each other and the lack of any true boundary between our body and those of others…

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. “Occupy immune systems,” a friend joked when she heard I was writing about vaccination, but I did not immediately recognize the joke and spent some time searching the Web for an organization called Occupy Immune Systems. The possibility did not seem unlikely. At that moment, the Occupy movement was carrying the declaration “We are the 99%” from Wall Street to Chicago to San Francisco, rapidly becoming an ongoing global protest of capitalism. 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.

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A Nigerian barber said, of the idea that vaccines were a Western plot against Muslims, “If the White man really wanted to destroy us, there are many other easier ways to do it. They can poison our coca-cola …” I tend to agree. And I suspect that Coca-Cola, unpoisoned, is more harmful to our children than vaccination. Just because we have enemies, Sedgwick proposes, does not mean we have to be paranoid. Our cynicism may be justified, but it is also sad. That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished.

Apply Occam's razor…

Middle East respiratory syndrome.