At Howard Playground, where Biss and Juneau used to play when they still lived in Rogers Park, there was a day care for underprivileged children. Biss noticed that the kids there were not getting everything they needed: their clothes were usually wrong for the weather, and they looked smaller than they should have been.“I thought, how would I feel if my son gave one of those kids chicken pox?” she says. “For him it’s not a terrible thing. We have good insurance and easy access to health care. It’s a different situation for another family. I didn’t want to make the decision for them.”
She also learned that chicken pox isn’t as harmless as she’d thought: before the vaccine was introduced, 10,000 children had been hospitalized with the disease every year, and of those, 70 had died.
Biss spent some time with scientists learning about the technical aspects of vaccination. “It was exciting and interesting, seeing how people in the sciences think about vaccines,” she says. “It’s different from laypeople. A common way of thinking about vaccines is that they’re taxing or challenging to the body. Parents feel reluctant to get too many at once. Scientists didn’t have that anxiety. The immunologist explained it best: we endure so much every day. There are more immunity challenges living life than a vaccine presents. Here at the beach, there’s dog poop, everything in the water. It’s way more challenging. One bacterium has thousands of immunological components. All the recommended vaccines together have 160.”