Media & Mercy - On Immunity: An Inoculation

Eula Biss begins On Immunity: An Inoculation—her 2014 manifesto in support of vaccination—by stating that, as a child, “I understood the universal donor more as an ethic than as a medical concept.” This is thanks to her father, a Catholic doctor. This is a man who, every time he went onto a boat, he “took a life preserver with his name and ‘Organ Donor’ written hugely on it in permanent ink.” And this is the same man who, when he taught Biss how to drive, he told her “you are responsible not just for the car you are driving, but also for the car ahead of you and the car behind you.” Unsurprisingly, he donated blood whenever he was able. Like his daughter, he firmly believed that “we owe each other our bodies.”

As someone who grew up in a house overflowing with neighbor-love, Biss can’t help but have Certain Opinions about the fears surrounding contagion and vaccination that have flourished in American culture lately. In the book, she doesn’t spend much time citing the data and studies that prove vaccination is safe. What she’s more worried about—where, in her opinion, the bigger danger lies—is the fact that so many people are willing to be swayed by the mere idea, however groundless, that vaccinations might be unsafe for children. It doesn’t matter that vaccination has been unequivocally proven to have immense societal benefits: many parents still believe that any threat to their child (even if its imaginary) should be shunned—even at the expense of the greater good. Much of Biss’ book is devoted to dismantling this notion. It might be her sister who, at one point, puts it the best: “Morality can’t be fully private, for many of the same reasons that a language can’t be fully private. You can’t be intelligible only to yourself.”

In an age in which many people flinch away from chastising sinners—in a day when people are encouraged to, above all else, follow their passions—Biss manages to remind people of the purpose of a common sense of morality. If people are only encouraged to live for themselves and extensions of themselves (in this case, their children), the common good will inevitably suffer. By chastising sinners, we don’t need to cast ourselves as juries or judges—but rather, only remind people of the common goals for which we all strive.

Teresa de Mallorca is the pseudonym of a neophyte who just completed the RCIA program at Holy Name

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