...an enthralling, deeply personal book that’s by turns lyrical and impassioned, lucid and enlightening – one woman’s journey to discover the best way forward for her son, herself and the communities of which we are all a part ... There are many wonderful, illuminating reflections in On Immunity, how vaccine refusal in Pakistan and Nigeria can be understood as a legitimate form of anti-colonial resistance; how capitalism has inadvertently limited our imaginations by making us blame it for everything; how metaphors of the body at 'war' with bacteria are misleading, and 'war' should be left to warmongers. Candide, Dracula and Silent Spring are mined for the ways they illustrate contemporary anxieties around toxins and vaccination ... Biss chose to vaccinate her son, and On Immunity is brave because it will attract hostility from those she implies are selfish or misguided in refusing to vaccinate. Her arguments are profoundly compelling, and her narratives are braided together with beauty and elegance. The book is itself an inoculation – it grafts and unites different traditions of the essay, and in doing so creates something stronger and more resilient. And its urgent message is an inoculation against ignorance and fearmongering: may it spread out through the world, bringing substance and common sense to the vaccination debate.
In her new book, the subtle, spellbinding On Immunity, [Biss] goes under the skin. She asks why vaccination triggers such anxiety — anxiety so intense it lives in the language: The British call it a 'jab,' Americans, a 'shot.' ... 'Our fears are dear to us,' she writes, and she parses these fears with kindness and complicity ... Biss is stealthy. She advances from all sides, like a chess player, drawing on science, myth, literature to herd us to the only logical end, to vaccinate. To refuse is to fall in love with our fears, to create a fantasy of our purity and vulnerability and forget all the ways we are dangerous ... Biss reminds us that we owe each other our lives.
...[an] elegant, intelligent and very beautiful book, which occupies a space between research and reflection, investigating our attitudes toward immunity and inoculation through a personal and cultural lens ... Make no mistake: Biss’ child is not unvaccinated. She is a vigorous advocate for inoculation; throughout the book, she reveals the rhetoric of the anti-vaccination movement for the sophistry it is. At the same time, she understands the fear at its heart ... What Biss is getting at is distrust of the other, an epidemic that cuts both ways. We live in a culture that prides itself on being rational, when in fact we are as governed by superstitions, suppositions, as we ever were ... On Immunity seeks to function as a cultural inoculation; hence the subtitle of the book. It is elliptical, elusive, neither collection nor narrative exactly but more a set of questions about how we frame our interactions with the world.
Biss’s contemporary plea — directed more specifically at her countrywomen — is less introspective, more journalistic, than Notes from No Man’s Land, but no less striking or accomplished ... Indeed, On Immunity may be too reasoned, too intelligent, too thoughtful, too philosophical — and be perceived by those who adamantly oppose its conclusions as too unrealistically altruistic — to be heard above the cacophony of sensationalized quackery that masquerades as debate about immunization...in our popular media. It is a necessary book — a hefty dose of compassionate rationality prescribed by our contemporary heir to Voltaire — asking us to take a long, hard look at the societal consequences of individual choices ... Her deep and articulate thoughtfulness, which is the defining trait of her narrative style, will probably not propel On Immunity onto the best-seller lists (though I hope to be proved wrong) but does allow the reader to distinguish the wood from the trees ... Plagues will rise again, warns Camus, and send their rats to our well-contented cities. In the meantime, we could do no better than to hand out copies of Biss’s compassionate, important, and surprisingly optimistic book to every new parent — together with a vaccination schedule.
Like many of the most interesting contemporary essayists—Rebecca Solnit comes to mind here as a useful comparison—Biss approaches the form with the sensibility of a poet. This isn’t so much a matter of her prose having a poetic density or charge, as of the composure with which it moves between subjects, bringing disparate parts into a stylized whole. She’s concerned with fear and inoculation and sickness, but considers them in such a way that everything is always a potential metaphor for something else—and this generates a kind of poetic alertness in the reader, an awareness that the topic at hand might at any point suddenly reveal itself, under the insistent pressure of the author’s gaze, as some other thing entirely ... Biss handles with real intellectual seriousness and sensitivity the fears of those who oppose the vaccination of infants. It’s a subject that is often presented, in an unsubtly gendered way, as a conflict between a bunch of hysterical young mothers and a soberly paternal scientific consensus. She acknowledges that these fears are misaligned, but refuses to dismiss them, and writes out of an understanding of where they might be coming from ... The power of Biss’s book stems, in the end, from its subtle insistence on the interrelationship of things—of the mythological and the medical, the private and the public, the natural and the unnatural—and on the idea that one’s relationship with disease and immunity is not distinct from one’s relationship with the world.
Biss’s gracious rhetoric and her insistence that she feels 'uncomfortable with both sides' of the rancorous fight may frustrate readers looking for a pro-vaccine polemic. Yet her approach might actually be more likely to sway fearful parents, offering them an alternative set of images and associations to use in thinking about immunization ... In one of the book’s most compelling passages, Biss takes on the question of whether shots are 'unnatural,' as some parents fear ... She also invokes the frontier spirit with an image of personal strength and determination: 'Vaccination is a kind of domestication of a wild thing, in that it involves our ability to harness a virus and break it like a horse, but its action depends on the natural response of the body.' This is writing designed to conquer anxiety. For, as Biss comes to realize, a 'central question of both citizenship and motherhood' is 'What will we do with our fear?'
Although Biss arrives at a definitive pro-vaccine stance in On Immunity, this is not one of those insipid, reader-affirming parenting books. Nor is it a polemic ... On Immunity might be classified as a work of deep ecology. It sees, for example, the body as a garden, the immune 'system' as a tidal ebb and flow, and immunity as inseparable from community. Above all, it seeks connections over divisions in its approach to the subject of our collective health ... With the subtitle 'An Inoculation', Biss seeks to fortify mothers (explicitly) with contextualizing information in the same way that an inert virus trains the immune response. She seeks to remind us, as motherhood tunnels our vision, of the bigger picture: of history, of class and race, of philosophy ... this big-minded book seeks to prime our defenses against a response that might, in the big picture, run contrary to our own self-interest, even our own health. It does so by refreshing the memories of those of us in the privileged position to fear even the vaccines intended to make our children safer, reminding us that there are many more on this planet who are far more vulnerable, and that, given how interdependent our porous bodies are, their vulnerability is also our own.
Although On Immunity concerns itself with a specific medical debate—the question of a link between vaccination and mental defects—it is, in its heart, an investigation of human fear in the face of lethal enemies that exist all around us, but that we cannot see ... There is no protection from interacting with the outside world, and no chance to remain indefinitely in a sealed bubble. One of the great strengths of Biss’s work is how she embraces this theme of community and champions the role of a collective social body in the fight against disease. This is the counterbalance to all her fretful anxiety, the note of hope and harmony that rings out over the chatter of fear ... rather than...stoke the flames of our instinctual terror, as so many talking heads gleefully did during the CDC debacle, she instead offers a rallying cry to disband the Us-and-Them mentality that underlies much of vaccination skepticism.
Biss’s impressive work...has many modes ...Though she ranges widely, Biss keeps a tight focus, and asks a simple question: why do people turn against what evidence suggests is best for them? What are we so afraid of? Her answers are as varied as her sources. Biss is the daughter of an oncologist and a poet and her writing is a distillation of the two disciplines. She has done the medical reading, she knows her facts, but she allows herself to feel on the page, to follow more imaginative trains of thought ... Sometimes she becomes almost too entangled in language, frequently defining her terms, tracing back etymologies and usage, but she’s quick to pan out too. On Immunity is as political as it is personal — Biss rails against a capitalism that has made unnatural individuals of us all — and as philosophical as it is political ... What Biss does best, however, is doubt. She develops arguments and amasses detail but she also allows her writing to be shot through with uncertainty. Not often does a writer baldly admit that they don’t know what something means...It is a very human non-fiction that emerges, comfortable with its questions. As a style, it supports the substance of Biss’s argument. We are, as a species, imperfect and interdependent, reliant on each other and irretrievably vulnerable. And that’s no bad thing.
On Immunity is a wide-ranging book, covering topics as diverse as pesticides, metaphor, and vampires, with influences ranging from Greek myth to Voltaire to Susan Sontag ... Were Biss a different kind of writer, this book might have been a point-by-point rebuttal of Jenny McCarthy and others in the anti-vaccination community. The results of scientific studies, after all, clearly support the use of vaccines. Readers hoping for such a rebuttal will no doubt find the book perplexing. Biss’s project, it turns out, is far grander than a simple explanation of the facts ... Admirers of the book-length essay will find this work remarkable. Few writers are able to so seamlessly stitch together literature, theory, personal experience, and science ... On Immunity is as much a book about trust as it is a book about vaccines. The current anti-vaccine crusade is grounded in a lack of trust of medicine, of science, of each other. Its arguments are based on the assumption that we can separate ourselves from those around us. Biss provides an inoculation against mistrust, against the primacy of the individual to the detriment of the community. Perhaps, as she makes her nuanced arguments, Biss is engaging in a radical act of trust, assuming that the public is capable of understanding more than simple sound bites.
...[an] elegant, intense essay on immunity ... Biss writes brilliantly about the swelling sense of vulnerability that came with her own pregnancy and the birth of her son ... Biss is as much alert to the metaphors at work in present attitudes to immunisation as she is to the medical controversies. (In fact at times they amount to the same thing; as she points out, the notion of an immune system is itself a metaphor.) ... On Immunity has the force and lucidity of Sontag’s assault on myth and pseudoscience, but it’s written out of a more uncertain personal and political predicament. Where Sontag wished to burn away the fog of euphemism that surrounded her own experience of cancer, Biss knows that in the case of immunity, metaphor is impossible to displace. She is writing about diseases (and cures) that involve us with the bodies of other people, that remind us we are never ourselves, entire and alone.
On Immunity is an influential entry into a passionately fought debate that divides American society in two: those who vaccinate their children, and those who don’t ... Biss is calling – politely but powerfully – for globalised society to examine its conscience, and vaccinate ... As well as setting out a compelling argument in favour of vaccination, on ethical as well as scientific grounds, On Immunity is a cultural study, in the tradition of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Weaving her own experiences of motherhood into the history and social implications of the vaccination debate, Biss uses vaccination as a way into talking about all sorts of other questions. At its core...this is a discussion about what we most fear, and whom we trust.
Biss...specializes in radical empathy ... In her new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, she pins vaccine skepticism to her corkboard, then inspects it from all angles. Although I am sure that Biss did not mean to write a polemic, she ends up with an agenda, and the agenda is more powerful for never being stated ... Biss comes not to rail against the vaccine skeptics, but to understand them. She is pro-vaccine, but she’s not an op-ed writer: she’s a high-style essayist, elliptical like Joan Didion, aphoristic like Susan Sontag, familiar like Anne Fadiman. Biss comes down on the side of science and reason, but in such an MFA-ish fashion that maybe some of the educated white women who are, alas, the main constituency for anti-vaccine nonsense, will be persuaded that they can trust Biss. Because she either has no animus toward those parents who withhold vaccines from their children, or because she hides that animus so very well—she’s a grandmaster of judgment-withholding—this may be the perfect book to hand to that mother or father of a newborn who is on the fence ... I read this book with pleasure ... few writers write prose as neat, efficient, and cliché-free as Eula Biss. One is never in doubt about her meaning, and one never despairs that she’s taking extra words to get it across. And so, amidst all the handwringing and careful listening to the other side, when it comes time to state the case for immunization, nobody does it better.
What, you don’t want to read nearly 200 pages about vaccination? The subject might sound dry to anyone who hasn’t been fiercely debating it in her mommy group. But consider this: Eula Biss’ fascinating pro-immunization book features a chapter on vampires ... it’s the creative thinking that makes On Immunity so compelling. Biss can turn practically anything into a metaphor for immunity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Occupy Wall Street movement, immigration policy, Greek mythology. And her theories about why anti-vaccine crusaders remain more afraid of inoculation than of disease itself are just as surprising as they are convincing ... This is a deeply philosophical book, one that’s less concerned with pure science than with the elemental fear that we can never protect our children from the world. In fact, Biss believes, no one can ever truly be inoculated from other people — nor should anyone be ... On Immunity will make you consider that idea on a fairly profound level.
In On Immunity, Eula Biss’s quietly impassioned new book, the author evinces no...hostility ... tactful, discerning, self-implicating ... In her understated way, she ends up building a case against the anti-vaccination movement that is more damning than either her father’s or mine ... For the most part...it is meditative rather than narrative: paragraphs slip from science to philosophy to Greek myth to vampires. At only 200-odd short pages, On Immunity probes a slew of big ideas, from the fiction of purity to the failure of government. All feed into the fundamental question: how to be a humane, non-insane parent circa 2014. In lesser hands, tackling so many themes could result in a mess. But Biss is able to pull it off, thanks to her intellectual poise and her lucid, frequently aphoristic prose.
The fears surrounding vaccines are not late-breaking news, as the author notes in this literate, rangy foray into the history and consequences of vaccination ... Biss also administers a thoughtful, withering critique to more recent fears of vaccine ... The author keeps the debate lively and surprising, touching on Rachel Carson here and 'Dr. Bob' there. She also includes her father’s wise counsel, which accommodates the many sides of the topic but arrives at a clear point of view: Vaccinate ... Brightly informative, giving readers a sturdy platform from which to conduct their own research and take personal responsibility.
