On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

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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