Eula Biss’s inoculation against misinformation about vaccines

immune 2Biss is 37, with a calm, thoughtful demeanor, much like the way she writes. Aside from a single college class in physiology, she doesn’t have a scientific background; she has an MFA from the University of Iowa in nonfiction writing. (“One of the brave things about Eula as a writer is her confronting of topics she most thinks she’s not qualified to write about,” says Jeff Shotts, her editor at Graywolf Press.) She began by reading articles online and talking with other mothers, who’d developed impressive technical vocabularies, throwing around terms like “thimerosal” and “squalene.” What, she wondered, is squalene? She learned it’s an organic compound manufactured in the human liver. A version of it derived from shark-liver oil was used in European flu viruses, but never in the U.S., which made all the hysteria over it pointless. She talked with her father, an old-school physician who told her bluntly that parents who deliberately infected their kids with chicken pox instead of getting them properly vaccinated were idiots. She talked with a pediatrician who’d been recommended to her as “left of center,” who assured her that because she and Bresland are white, middle-class professionals who don’t live in an inner city, they didn’t have to worry about vaccinating Juneau against hepatitis B.

Biss ended up skipping Juneau’s first hep B vaccine, not because the doctor told her to, but because she was still uncertain. But his recommendation raised some questions for her that, strangely, related to her previous book, Notes From No Man’s Land, a collection of essays about race in America. “I was back in familiar territory,” she says, “how one person uses privilege. There are large numbers of people who don’t have good access to health care. African-American children are more likely to be undervaccinated. There’s poverty. It’s a complex web. If I exercise privilege [not to vaccinate], I may not hurt Juneau, but his body serves as a vector for disease.”

In On Immunity, Biss draws a distinction between the unvaccinated and the undervaccinated. Undervaccinated children have some of their shots, but not all; their lack of vaccination is not because their parents have decided to take a moral stand but because they simply don’t have access to health care. During the pertussis epidemic in California in 2010, caused in part by parents in mostly white, mostly wealthy Marin County who chose not to vaccinate their children (though Biss emphasizes that there were other factors as well), ten babies died. Nine of them were poor Hispanics.

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