Nov 5, 2022
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“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.”
— Eula Biss, On Immunity (p. 19)
9.
On Immunity: An Inoculation, by Eula Bliss.
Also a reread because, well, it seemed topical at the time. A novella-length essay about vaccination and anti-vax sentiment, their history, and Bliss' own experiences vaccinating her child. It's all a bit meandering and prone to digressions and extended analogies, but Bliss is a good enough author to pretty much pull it off. In a sense basically just very well-written pro-vaccine propaganda but, like, that's hardly a bad thing.
'Why target two and a half million innocent newborns and children?' Barbara Loe Fisher asks of the Hep B vaccine. The implication behind the word innocent is that only those who are not need protection form disease. All of us who grew up during the AIDS epidemic were exposed to the idea that AIDS was a punishment for homosexuality, promiscuity, and addiction. But if disease is a punishment for anything, it is only a punishment for being alive.
Eula Bliss, On Immunity
I did not feel like I was coming back to life as the refrigerated blood entered my veins. I felt an ominous cold ache spreading from my arm towards my chest. 'People aren't usually awake for this,' the doctor said when I mentioned the temperature of the blood. He was standing precariously on a stool with wheels, improvising a rig that would hold the bag of blood closer to the ceiling so that gravity would pull it into my body more quickly. By hospital policy my baby could not be in the recover room with me and the doctor could not change that, but he could try and devise a way to get the blood into me faster so I could leave the recovery room sooner. My vision began to blacken around the edges, my stomach turned, and the room span around me. This was all normal, the doctor assured me. 'Remember,' he said 'it's not your blood.'
Eula Bliss, On Immunity
The very first decision I made for my son, a decision enacted within moments of his body coming free of mine, was the donation of his umbilical cord to a public bank. At thirty, I had only donated blood once, back in college when I was reading Kierkegaard. I wanted my son to start his life with a credit in the bank, not the debt I already felt.
Eula Bliss, On Immunity
In the twentieth century, psychologists blamed schizophrenia on overbearing mothers who smothered their children. Homosexuality, categorized as a mental disorder until 1973, was blamed on anxious mothers who coddled their children. Autism, according to the prevailing theory of the 1950s, was blamed on cold, insensitive 'refrigerator mothers'. Even now, mothers provide a 'convenient missing link to germ theory,' as the psychotherapist Janna Malamud Smith observes. 'If it's not viral or bacterial,' she quips 'it must be maternal.'
Eula Bliss, On Immunity