Vaccination debate gets an injection of sanity

On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99)

In December 2014 seven people who visited Disneyland in California fell ill with measles. Since then more than 100 people have caught the infection. The outbreak has sharpened debate about the global decline in vaccination rates, and it lends a certain baleful timeliness to the British publication of Eula Biss’s volume of essays on the subject of immunity.

When Biss was a child her father, an oncologist, told her the myth of Achilles, whose mother, Thetis, dipped him in the River Styx in the hope of making him immortal. He emerged from the torrent invulnerable but for a fatal spot on his heel where she had held him. Biss remarks that she found the moral of the story — that no mortal can ever become invulnerable — easier to grasp before she became a parent.

Her son was born in 2009, just as a novel strain of influenza, the H1N1 virus, began spreading across the United States, and she found herself immediately engaged in an anxious discussion about the merits of infant vaccination. “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,” she writes.

This is the principle of herd immunity but, as Biss observes, language is as powerful in its way as contagion, and in an era of stringent individualism the idea of belonging to a herd can seem uninviting: “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.”

The homestead view of vaccination is one that has been adopted by a variety of public figures in the US, including the Republican presidential candidate (and physician) Rand Paul, who has argued that vaccination should be voluntary, and the former Playboy model and actress Jenny McCarthy, who attributes her son’s autism to vaccination.

Biss, an academic whose expertise is literary rather than medical, is intrigued by the vocabulary of dread that describes vaccination in terms of the corruption of the “pure” infant. Her research turned up an 1881 handbill titled The Vaccination Vampire, which warned of the “universal pollution” delivered by the vaccinator to the “pure babe”. The language, and the sentiments, find an echo in the 21st-century discourse about vaccination.

Biss admits that she is not, so to speak, immune from the tendency. Her son was vaccinated as an infant (she notes that the doctor assured her that the hepatitis B vaccine wasn’t something “people like her” needed to worry about — meaning she wasn’t poor, a prostitute or a drug addict). But she admits that the first time her child drank anything other than her breast milk she felt “agony” at the thought of impurities entering his body — only to discover that breast milk can contain levels of environmental pollutants that would cause it to be regarded as unfit for human consumption.

With a range of reference encompassing Voltaire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Susan Sontag, Biss anatomises with grace and humanity the secret fears, fantasies and power struggles that surround vaccination. In the clamour of emotion that is stirred by this subject, her beautifully produced volume of essays is a quiet argument for reason.

Go to eveningstandard.ca/booksdirect to buy this book for £11.69, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p