EULA BISS

We've been using vaccination in some form for hundreds of years now. We have almost nothing in our modern medicine that we've been using that long, and it's been consistently productive even though, you know, the older vaccines were much more dangerous than vaccines we're using now.

One of the mysteries of hep B immunization is that vaccinating only 'high risk' groups, which was the original public health strategy, did not bring down rates of infection.

I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject.

My own thinking is often clarified and extended by talking with students.

I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.

I think that people's resistance to vaccination isn't going to disappear until we address some of the nonmedical reasons for that resistance and people's discomfort and distrust of the government. That's bigger than what most medical professionals can handle.

Art-making was part of my daily life from a very young age, and I still love that kind of everyday art-making.

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.

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.

I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.

Our constitution got built around the idea of minority protection.

As for mercury, a child will almost certainly get more mercury exposure from her immediate environment than from vaccination. This is true, too, of the aluminum that is often used as an adjuvant in vaccines to intensify the immune response.

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.

My son is fully vaccinated, but there is one immunization on the standard schedule that he did not receive on time. This was meant to be his very first shot, the hep B administered to most babies immediately after birth.

There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.

Yes, we can make prudent choices as parents, but we can't create an environment where there's zero risk for our children. Not only is that impossible, I don't think it's desirable, either.

I think that protecting children at the age where they're most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent.

Fears that formaldehyde from vaccines may cause cancer are similar to fears of mercury and aluminum, in that they coalesce around miniscule amounts of the substance in question, amounts considerably smaller than amounts from other common sources of exposure to the same substance.

Babies born to women who are infected with hep B - and mothers can carry the virus without their knowledge - will almost certainly be infected if they are not vaccinated within twelve hours of birth.

Bram Stoker's 'Dracula,' in my reading, is really obviously about disease and our relation to disease.

Our community of contagion really is a world community.

There's something ancient and inevitable about this desire to do whatever you can to protect your child.

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator.

The risk of getting Hep B from a blood transfusion is a tiny number, but it's a bigger number than the risk of side effects from the vaccine.

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.