On Immunity: An Inoculation

Those who went on to use Wakefield’s inconclusive work to support the notion that vaccines cause autism are not guilty of ignorance or science denial so much as they are guilty of using weak science as it has always been used—to lend false credibility to an idea that we want to believe for other reasons.

This is not to say that concerns over environmental pollution are not justified—like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers—but that the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pur

I do think they may be indulging in a variety of preindustrial nostalgia that I too find seductive.

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.

The concept of a “risk group,” Susan Sontag writes, “revives the archaic idea of a tainted community that illness has judged.”

“Vaccination works,” my father explains, “by enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.” He means the minority of the population that is particularly vulnerable to a given disease.

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.

“Morality can’t be fully private,” my sister tells me, “for many of the same reasons that a language can’t be fully private. You can’t be intelligible only to yourself. But thinking of the conscience as a private sense of right and wrong suggests that our collective understandings of justice can be insufficient. An individual might resist flaws in

The extent to which it is hard to imagine an ethos powerful enough to compete with capitalism, even if that ethos is based on the inherent value of human lives, is suggestive of how successfully capitalism has limited our imaginations.