Words matter. These are the best Eula Biss Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s this tendency to think of the individual and the collective are somehow at odds or separate. But I think that’s really false. We’re all both. And when the individual suffers, the collective suffers, and vice versa.
Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do.
I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.
One of the shortcomings of our medical system is that doctors have very little time with their patients.
We’ve been using vaccination in some form for hundreds of years now. We have almost nothing in our modern medicine that we’ve been using that long, and it’s been consistently productive even though, you know, the older vaccines were much more dangerous than vaccines we’re using now.
What I saw when I was doing research is that in pursuit of a middle ground, people will kind of split the difference between the two extremes that they’re hearing. And I think what’s problematic is that people are seeing vaccinating on schedule, on time, as an extreme position.
Fears that formaldehyde from vaccines may cause cancer are similar to fears of mercury and aluminum, in that they coalesce around miniscule amounts of the substance in question, amounts considerably smaller than amounts from other common sources of exposure to the same substance.
As for mercury, a child will almost certainly get more mercury exposure from her immediate environment than from vaccination. This is true, too, of the aluminum that is often used as an adjuvant in vaccines to intensify the immune response.
If your child’s going to ride in a car or go swimming or play soccer, all of those things involve risk. And if your child doesn’t do any of those things, then they’re probably sitting too much, and that involves risk, too.
Nigeria and Pakistan are two countries that have had a lot of trouble with polio. And part of the reason is that there’s a lot of political unrest, and people really distrust what the government is doing. That has an effect on people’s health, and it has an effect on the health of children.
In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage.
There’s a cultural expectation that everyone will be immunized, in part to protect the entire population. When people refuse that expectation, they’re indulging in a certain kind of political or social immunity.
I think there’s a temptation to try to think of people who don’t vaccinate as a homogenous community, but I’m not convinced that’s true. I’m not even sure that the word ‘community’ is totally accurate there, you know.
My mother wrote poetry when I was young – I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter – and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.
In some areas, immunity has been eroded so much that the child who’s not vaccinated is now actually more vulnerable to the complications of infectious diseases.
Our constitution got built around the idea of minority protection.
My son is fully vaccinated, but there is one immunization on the standard schedule that he did not receive on time. This was meant to be his very first shot, the hep B administered to most babies immediately after birth.
There’s something ancient and inevitable about this desire to do whatever you can to protect your child.
I think that protecting children at the age where they’re most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent.
I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that’s awfully vague.
Yes, we can make prudent choices as parents, but we can’t create an environment where there’s zero risk for our children. Not only is that impossible, I don’t think it’s desirable, either.
Yes, there’s a higher rate of people living below the poverty line who aren’t vaccinated. But it’s much rarer for that to be a product of choice than a product of circumstance.
The risk of getting Hep B from a blood transfusion is a tiny number, but it’s a bigger number than the risk of side effects from the vaccine.
I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject.
A vaccine introduces a small amount or a tempered version of the virus into the body – just enough to that the body is able to recognize it and deal with it when it encounters it again in the future.
