Eula Biss’s inoculation against misinformation about vaccines

It also led Biss to a particularly entertaining research tangent: vampirism, starting with Dracula. (She decided she could skip the Twilight series, but she did watch True Blood.) “There’s something different about wanting to live forever,” she says. “It’s demented. Monsters live forever. I started thinking about the problem of privileging survival above all things.”

In the 2012 film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, there’s a scene where Mary Todd Lincoln begs Lincoln to revive their son, who has just died of a fever. Lincoln refuses. “There’s an interesting buried theme,” Biss says. “You don’t want everlasting life for your child at all costs. It’s scary and monstrous. Wanting to survive is reasonable. Wanting your child to be healthy is reasonable.” She looks over at Juneau, who is sprawled on the beach, arranging sand and rocks into what he will later explain is a platter of chicken wings. “Privileging your child’s health over everything else becomes scary. It’s vampirism.”

She decided Juneau needed to be fully vaccinated. “It wasn’t epiphanous,” she says. “It took research and thought. It was a slow dawning.” There were no problems, aside from a bad reaction to a flu vaccine; it was a nose squirt and, at the time, they didn’t realize Juneau has asthma. He doesn’t mind the shots, though. “After the shot, I felt great!” he exclaims before running into the water.

Still, there was one vaccine Biss was wavering on: the one for chicken pox, which hadn’t existed when she was growing up in upstate New York in the 1980s. In her experience—middle-class, with a father who was a doctor—having chicken pox had been more of a childhood rite of passage than a serious crisis.

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