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  • Graywolf Press

"Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford," writes Eula Biss in her book, On Immunity: An Inoculation. Biss, who will be discussing the difference between access to vaccines in wealthy countries like ours, and those with fewer resources. That idea—that it's a privilege to decline a vaccine, and to rely on the immunity of others—is one reason Biss' book should be required reading for anyone considering opting out of vaccination.

And while I suspect that Biss might take issue with that statement, and my prescriptive headline—On Immunity is a whole lot more nuanced than that—she's written a necessary inquiry into vaccine panic, that delivers a surprisingly hopeful message: Those of us who can be vaccinated (aka those of us who aren't immunosuppressed) have an obligation to get vaccinated against infectious disease, because our immunity shields those who are more vulnerable. In other words, you don't get your flu shot just for yourself, but for all of the elderly people and babies and people with weakened immune systems that you come into contact with in your community every day—people who can't receive the vaccine, and who can't risk the illness.

Biss' inquiry into herd immunity—what I just described—was prompted after the birth of her son, and during the height of the H1N1 outbreak, when the question of vaccination against the flu arose. She ended up vaccinating her child, but found herself in conversations with parents who were frightened of vaccination, so she started researching vaccines and wrote a whole goddamn book about where vaccine panic comes from, what vaccines actually are, and why they're critical to public health.

Because Biss is a poet whose essays are usually freewheeling and exhaustive in their sources, On Immunity considers this question through conversations with immunologists, statistics from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the writings of Susan Sontag and Donna Haraway, and stories about vampires. It's a fascinating, heady mix, and it's exciting to see Biss leap between her disparate sources in search of the truth.

What she finds—that vaccines are hugely necessary, and fears around them largely unfounded—isn't new information, but what is is Biss' compassion for the vaccine-phobic parents she knows. At first, I found this annoying (I know where I stand on vaccines, and it's sure as fuck not with Jenny McCarthy), but as the book progressed, I realized that this was what made On Immunity so effective. Biss considers the fears of her fellow parents, and her own fears about parenting, and takes them seriously. Seriously enough to realize that vaccine panic has less to do with vaccines themselves, and more to do with the illusion of being able to protect your child from harm, something that Biss suggests can only be done incompletely—but that one way, ironically, is through vaccination. And because of how herd immunity works, children who aren't vaccinated are often protected from disease by an environment in which the people around them are vaccinated. In other words, if you don't vaccinate your child against measles, and your child doesn't get measles, you actually have vaccination to thank.

Biss puts it this way: "[R]efusing 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."

I'm inclined to agree. But perhaps more importantly, Biss also presents an alternative to the vaccine panic she finds. "Paranoia, the theorist Eve Sedgwick observes, tends to be contagious," writes Biss. "And paranoia very frequently passes for intelligence... [Sedgwick] does not believe that paranoid thinking is necessarily delusional or wrong, but only that there is value to approaches that are less rooted in suspicion." Approaches like the one in this book.


Eula Biss will discuss
On Immunity tonight at the Alberta Rose Theatre. More info here.