“My husband held up a video camera,” Biss writes in her new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, “and asked me to speak to the future, but the sound did not record, so whatever I said has been lost to the past. What remains evident on my face is that I was not afraid. . . . By the time my son was born late the next day a cold rain was falling and I had crossed over into a new realm in which I was no longer fearless.”
Parenthood for Biss began with emergency surgery and a blood transfusion; in a rare complication (one birth in 3,000), her uterus had inverted after delivery. But after the initial fright of waking up in an operating room, “lashed with tubes and wires” with the “sense that I had, indeed, gone down to the banks of the River Styx,” all her fears were for Juneau.
After they came home, she filled a notebook with obscure notations tracking the times that he cried, and instead of sleeping, she huddled by the baby monitor at night listening to him breathe. She wanted to protect him from all the dangers of the world. With modern medicine, the best way to do this seemed to be vaccination. But there were so many stories about the damage vaccines could do. “As I understood it then,” she writes, “this was not a question of whether I would protect him so much as it was a question of whether inoculation was a risk worth taking.” She couldn’t stop thinking about fairy tales and myths about parents who, in attempting to save their children, actually end up condemning them to death.
So she started doing research.