On Immunity
We cannot shield ourselves
Description
In 2009, in the middle of the H1N1 flu scare, Eula Biss gave birth to her first child. She was a writer and an essayist, not a scientist, and like a lot of new mothers she found herself suddenly awake at strange hours reading about everything that might be coming for her son — the mattress off-gassing chemicals, the tap water, the shots the pediatrician wanted to give him, the invisible flu circulating through his future daycare. Fear, she noticed, arrived on schedule with the baby. It was almost part of the equipment.
Out of that fear she wrote a slim, strange book called On Immunity, published in 2014. It is not a manual and it is not a takedown of the anti-vaccine movement, though vaccines are its spine. It is closer to a long, careful conversation — with other mothers at the playground, with her physician father, and with a shelf of books that turn out to have a lot to say about contamination and protection: the myth of Achilles dipped in the river, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag on illness and its metaphors.
What Biss keeps circling is the thing underneath the arguments about mercury and toxins and trust. Not whether vaccines are safe — she is clear that they are — but why the wish to keep a child clean of the world runs so deep, and why it can't be granted. She wants to know what we are really talking about when we talk about immunity.
The question we’re asking : Why does the wish to shield a child from the world feel so urgent, and why does Biss conclude it can never actually be satisfied?What we’ll see : How one mother's fear opens onto the old stories, metaphors and myths of purity we carry into the doctor's office — and what they hide about how bodies belong to each other.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — A new mother reads the news
Biss starts where the fear starts: with a body that is suddenly not only your own. Pregnant, then nursing, she describes the odd new porousness of motherhood — the sense that whatever she ate, breathed or touched was passing straight into someone smaller and more vulnerable. The world stopped being background. Every ordinary object acquired a possible danger, and the danger always seemed to be aimed at the child.
The H1N1 pandemic gave that anxiety a shape. There was a vaccine, rushed and new, and there were rumors about it, and there were mothers around her who had decided, quietly, not to trust it. Biss noticed how quickly the conversation among educated, careful, well-meaning women turned away from doctors and toward each other — toward intuition, toward the feeling that the natural thing must be the safer thing. She recognized the pull herself. She was not standing outside it.
02Chapter 2 — The metaphors we catch
Biss's method is to follow the language. When people talk about vaccines, she notices, they almost never stay literal for long. They reach for images — poison, purity, contamination, invasion — and those images have long histories that shape the argument before any evidence gets a hearing. She goes looking for where the images come from.
She opens with Achilles, dipped by his mother into the river Styx to make him invulnerable, held by the heel that stayed dry and unprotected. It is, Biss suggests, the founding fantasy of immunization: a mother trying to make her child untouchable, and the small unavoidable spot she misses. The myth already knows what the anxious parent refuses to — that total protection leaves exactly one fatal gap, and that the effort itself has a cost.
03Chapter 3 — Purity is a fantasy
Once the metaphors are on the table, Biss turns to the belief they protect: that there exists a pure state, a clean body or a clean environment, which vigilance could preserve. She spends the middle of the book dismantling it, gently and thoroughly.
Take the fear of toxins. Biss looks hard at the word and finds it doing sleight of hand. Everything is a chemical; the dose makes the poison; the substances that frighten people are often present in vanishingly small amounts, sometimes smaller than what occurs in a breastfed baby's own milk or in the air of any ordinary room. The purely natural body she was picturing — untouched, unadulterated — does not exist and never did. We are already, all of us, full of the world.
04Chapter 4 — The body as a shared account
Having taken apart the fortress, Biss offers something to put in its place, and it is the heart of the book. Immunity, she proposes, is not a wall around an individual. It is something held in common — a shared space, a kind of trust, a bank account that each of us pays into and draws from without ever quite settling the debt.
She reaches for a better metaphor than the fortress: immunity as a commons, like a public field or a shared water supply. When enough people are vaccinated, the disease cannot travel, and that protection covers even those who cannot be vaccinated — newborns, the immune-compromised, the sick. Your vaccinated body is standing guard over strangers' children. Their vaccinated bodies stood guard over yours before you were old enough to know it. The protection was always mutual, always borrowed, never earned alone.
05Conclusion
Biss ends more or less where she began, with a mother and a small child and a decision about a shot. But the fear has changed temperature. The mother reading the news at three in the morning wanted a barrier; the writer who finished the book has stopped believing in barriers and started counting on other people instead. She vaccinates her son not despite the interconnection she feared but because of it — because his body and every other body are, in the end, the same account.