If your child’s going to ride in a car or go swimming or play soccer, all of those things involve risk. And if your child doesn’t do any of those things, then they’re probably sitting too much, and that involves risk, too. Eula Biss Read Quote
Yes, there’s a higher rate of people living below the poverty line who aren’t vaccinated. But it’s much rarer for that to be a product of choice than a product of circumstance. Eula Biss Read Quote
Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’ in my reading, is really obviously about disease and our relation to disease. Eula Biss Read Quote
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. Eula Biss Read Quote
On the pro-vaccine side – and not everyone does this, but I saw it enough for it to make me really uncomfortable – is a tendency to accuse people who are wary of vaccination of being stupid and not understanding science. Eula Biss Read Quote
In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage. Eula Biss Read Quote
In the story of Thetis and Achilles, it’s clear this isn’t really a safe environment. She’s gone down to the River Styx – the dead are being ferried across in the background. There’s something in this mythology that says that if you want invulnerability, if you want immortality, you pay a price. Eula Biss Read Quote
Some of the most interesting research that I did was about risk assessment and how ordinary citizens like me handle risk assessment and how irregular our risk assessments are. Eula Biss Read Quote
In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot. Eula Biss Read Quote
In some areas, immunity has been eroded so much that the child who’s not vaccinated is now actually more vulnerable to the complications of infectious diseases. Eula Biss Read Quote
