On Immunity Quotes

“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.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“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.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“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.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“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.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you feel about it. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“The belief that public health measures are not intended for people like us is widely held by many people like me. Public health, we assume, is for people with less—less education, less-healthy habits, less access to quality health care, less time and money. I have heard mothers of my class suggest, for instance, that the standard childhood immunization schedule groups together multiple shots because poor mothers will not visit the doctor frequently enough to get the twenty-six recommended shots separately. No matter that any mother, myself included, might find so many visits daunting. That, we seem to be saying of the standard schedule, is for people like them.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“For toxicologists, “the dose makes the poison.” Any substance can be toxic in excess. Water, for instance, is lethal to humans in very high doses, and overhydration killed a runner in the 2002 Boston Marathon. But most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“And I suspect that Coca-Cola, unpoisoned, is more harmful to our children than vaccination.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children's book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“What he is drawn to in their philosophy, he tells me, is the idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you feel about it. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” What has been done to us seems to be, among other things, that we have been made fearful. What will we do with our fear? This strikes me as a central question of both citizenship and motherhood. As mothers, we must somehow square our power with our powerlessness. We can protect our children to some extent. But we cannot make them invulnerable any more than we can make ourselves invulnerable. “Life,” as Donna Haraway writes, “is a window of vulnerability.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“In a section of The Vaccine Book titled “Is it your social responsibility to vaccinate your kids?” Dr. Bob asks, “Can we fault parents for putting their own child’s health ahead of that of the kids around him?” This is meant to be a rhetorical question, but Dr. Bob’s implied answer is not mine. In another section of the book, Dr. Bob writes of his advice to parents who fear the MMR vaccine, “I also warn them not to share their fears with their neighbors, because if too many people avoid the MMR, we’ll likely see the disease increase significantly.” I do not need to consult an ethicist to determine that there is something wrong there, but my sister clarifies my discomfort. “The problem is in making a special exemption just for yourself,” she says. This reminds her of a way of thinking proposed by the philosopher John Rawls: Imagine that you do not know what position you are going to hold in society—rich, poor, educated, insured, no access to health care, infant, adult, HIV positive, healthy immune system, etc.—but that you are aware of the full range of possibilities. What you would want in that situation is a policy that is going to be equally just no matter what position you end up in. “Consider relationships of dependence,” my sister suggests. “You don’t own your body—that’s not what we are, our bodies aren’t independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making.” She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rare for her. “I don’t even know how to talk about this,” she says. “The point is there’s an illusion of independence.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. “They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders.” Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk. In a study that invited people to compare various causes of death, Slovic found that people tended to believe that accidents cause more deaths than disease and that homicide causes more deaths than suicide, when the opposite is true in both cases. In another study, people significantly overestimated the fatality rates of highly publicized or dramatic dangers like cancer or tornadoes. One could interpret this, as Sunstein does, to mean that most people are just wrong about risk. But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear. Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.”
― eula biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“While we routinely call for more vaccine testing, and more human trials, the unspoken assumption is that we do not intend our children to be the subjects of those trials.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Debates over vaccination, then as now, are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“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.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“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.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“A trust—in the sense of a valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong—captures, more or less, my understanding of what it is to have a child.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“If vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Consider relationships of dependence,' my sister suggests. 'You don't own your body- that's not what we are, our bodies aren't independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making.' She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rare for her. 'I don't even know how to talk about this,' she says. 'The point is there's an illusion of independence.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“AIDS education taught us the importance of protecting our bodies from contact with other bodies, and this seems to have bred another kind of insularity, a preoccupation with the integrity of the individual immune system. Building, boosting, and supplementing one’s personal immune system is a kind of cultural obsession of the moment. I know mothers who believe this is a viable substitute for vaccination, and who understand themselves as raising children with superior immune systems. But children with superior immune systems can still pass disease. Pertussis, like polio and Hib disease and HIV, can be carried without symptoms.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“In 2012, a Taliban leader in northern Pakistan banned polio vaccination in his region until the United States ceased drone strikes there. Vaccination campaigns, he claimed, were a form of American espionage. While resembling the rumors of secret plots in Nigeria, this was, unfortunately, more easily verifiable. In pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the CIA had used a fake vaccination campaign—administering real hep B vaccine, but not the three doses necessary for immunity—to gather DNA evidence to help verify bin Laden’s location. This deception, like other acts of war, would cost the lives of women and children. The Lady Health Workers of Pakistan, a team of over 110,000 women trained to deliver health care door-to-door, had already endured years of brutal intimidation by the Taliban and hardly needed association with the CIA. Not long after the Taliban banned immunization, nine polio vaccinators, five of them women, were murdered in a coordinated series of attacks.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“One of the mysteries of hep B immunization is that vaccinating only “high risk” groups, which was the original public health strategy, did not bring down rates of infection. When the vaccine was introduced in 1981, it was recommended for prisoners, health care workers, gay men, and IV drug users. But rates of hep B infection remained unchanged until the vaccine was recommended for all newborns a decade later. Only mass vaccination brought down the rates of infection, and it has now virtually eliminated the disease in children.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Caretaking, she suggests, is not an inherent threat to liberty. “From a feminist, caring framework,” Peterson writes, “liberty is not defined as complete separation and independence from the parent.” If fathering still reminds us of oppressive control, mothering might help us imagine relationships based not just on power, but also care.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“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.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation