Taking a ‘frontier mentality’ against vaccinating one’s children leaves the rest of society vulnerable

For a fresh approach to the argument against vaccinations of children as “unnatural,” Eula Biss offers this fresh anology: Think of a virus as running loose in the wild, much like a mustang.

“Our ability to harness a virus and break it like a horse,” that is, domesticate a “once-wild thing” into a vaccine, is very natural, she writes in “On Immunity.”

Using other frontier images such as “herd mentality” and “isolated homesteads,” Biss’s book explores the chronic fear and uncertainty that comes with parenthood and with our own bodies, the risk we face with ordinary objects like mattresses, diapers, food, air and vaccinations and the ways we try to minimize those risks.

Though her subjects are varied, from the link in literature between disease and vampirism, to chemicals and biological warfare, she repeatedly comes back to vaccinations and what they represent.

Biss breaks down the misconceptions we have about them; untangling the arguments and even the militaristic language we use to discuss our bodies and vaccines with precise, lyrical, and unforgettable prose.

Vaccination can be thought of as a “banking of immunity. Contributions to the bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity.”

Some children and adults are immunocompromised and cannot depend on the body’s “natural response” to a virus, so they must depend on the community, or on the herd immunity, to keep them healthy.

Herd immunity in itself is a contentious phrase, Biss points out, because “the herd, we assume, is foolish. Those of us who eschew the herd mentality tend to prefer a frontier mentality in which we imagine our bodies as isolated homesteads that we tend either well or badly. The health of the homestead next to ours does not affect us, this thinking suggests, so long as ours is well tended.”

Biss brings up a routine visit with a doctor over her son’s vaccinations. Without knowing anything about her background, the doctor told Biss that “Hep B was a vaccine for the inner city... designed to protect the babies of drug addicts and prostitutes. It was not something... that people like me needed to worry about.”

Biss confesses, “In retrospect, I am ashamed of how little of the racial code I registered. Relieved to be told that this vaccine was not for people like me, I failed to consider what exactly that meant.”

Historically, vaccines have been used against as another method of “bodily servitude extracted from the poor for the benefit of the privileged.” Entire poor communities were rounded up and forcibly vaccinated.

The current vaccination controversy in that unvaccinated children are most often white children from relatively wealthy backgrounds, but they must depend on the majority to be vaccinated in order to benefit.

This thinking depends on the idea that public health is “for people with less — less education, less healthy habits, less access to quality health care, less time and money.”

The author is willing and even eager to admit her own privilege, while at the same time being generous with others about theirs. Biss argues that those with privilege should be more willing to vaccinate, if not for medical reasons then for moral ones because “if vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love.”

In an impeccably researched book that spans centuries, continents and cultures, ultimately Biss is asking: What do we do with our fear — of our government, of others, of sickness, of our own bodies? She uses stirring language that leaves the reader unsettled, unsure of where the individual ends and the community begins.

This story was originally published September 26, 2014 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Taking a ‘frontier mentality’ against vaccinating one’s children leaves the rest of society vulnerable."