On Immunity: An Inoculation

Those who went on to use Wakefield’s inconclusive work to support the notion that vaccines cause autism are not guilty of ignorance or science denial so much as they are guilty of using weak science as it has always been used—to lend false credibility to an idea that we want to believe for other reasons.

Susan Sontag writes, “Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one’s actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability.”

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

I do think they may be indulging in a variety of preindustrial nostalgia that I too find seductive.

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.

The purpose of heroic medicine was not so much to heal the patient as it was to produce some measurable, and ideally dramatic, effect for which the patient could be billed.

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.”

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.

This is not to say that concerns over environmental pollution are not justified—like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers—but that the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pur