On Immunity: An Inoculation

What has been done to us seems to be, among other things, that we have been made fearful. What will we do with our fear? This strikes me as a central question of both citizenship and motherhood.

I had little confidence, consumer or otherwise, but I tended to believe that confidence was less important than the kind of trust that transcends the self.

If we understand ourselves as living in a world of unseen evils, the immune system, that largely conceptual entity devoted to protecting us from invisible threats, will inevitably take on an inflated importance and a distorted function.

Herd immunity, an observable phenomenon, now seems implausible only if we think of our bodies as inherently disconnected from other bodies. Which, of course, we do.

We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us. We drive around in cars, a lot. We drink alcohol, we ride bicycles, we sit too much. And we harbor anxiety about things that, statistically speaking, pose us little danger. We fear sharks, while mosquitoes are, in terms of sheer numbers of lives lost, probably the most dange

Debates over vaccination, then as now, are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power.

Over the next decade, study after study would fail to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and even researchers sympathetic to Wakefield’s hypothesis were unable to replicate his work. In 2004, an investigative journalist discovered that Wakefield had been paid for his research by a lawyer preparing a lawsuit against a vaccine manufactur

We are all “cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras,” as Haraway suggests in her feminist provocation “A Cyborg Manifesto.” She envisions a cyborg world “in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”

our bodies may belong to us, but we ourselves belong to a greater body composed of many bodies. We are, bodily, both independent and dependent.