On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Morality can’t be fully private,” my sister tells me, “for many of the same reasons that a language can’t be fully private. You can’t be intelligible only to yourself. But thinking of the conscience as a private sense of right and wrong suggests that our collective understandings of justice can be insufficient. An individual might resist flaws in

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

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.”

ONE OF THE APPEALS OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE is that it offers not just an alternative philosophy or an alternative treatment but also an alternative language. If we feel polluted, we are offered a “cleanse.” If we feel inadequate, lacking, we are offered a “supplement.” If we fear toxins, we are offered “detoxification.” If we fear that we are rusti

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.

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity.

Our cynicism may be justified, but it is also sad. That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us.

The concept of self is fundamental to the science of immunity, and the dominant thinking in immunology is that the immune system must discriminate between self and nonself, and then eliminate or contain the nonself within protective barriers.

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.