On Immunity: An Inoculation by Biss Eula

Author:Biss, Eula [Biss, Eula]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Tags: Medical, Immunizations, Inoculations
ISBN: 9781555976897
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2014-09-29T05:00:00+00:00

MY GRANDFATHER LOST HIS FATHER to tuberculosis when he was ten. On the other side of my family, both my grandmother and my grandfather lost siblings to infectious diseases. One family lost a toddler to measles and a teenager to sepsis, and the other family lost a toddler to pertussis and a teenager to tetanus. When my father was a boy, his brother was bedridden for six months with rheumatic fever. He lived, but he suffered permanent heart damage and died young of heart failure.

My father was vaccinated against five diseases as a child. I was vaccinated against seven, and my son has been vaccinated against fourteen. The proliferation of childhood vaccines has become, for some of us, a kind of metaphor for American excess. Too many, too soon, one of the slogans common to vaccine activism, could easily be a critique of just about any aspect of our modern lives.

The smallpox vaccine my father received contained far more immunizing proteins, or active ingredient, so to speak, than any of the vaccines we use today. These proteins are what the immune system is reacting to when it responds to a vaccine. In that sense, a single dose of the smallpox vaccine our parents received presented a greater challenge to the immune system than the total challenge presented by all the twenty-six immunizations for fourteen diseases we now give to our children over the course of two years.

When asked by his colleagues to address the question of whether too many vaccines are given too early in life, the pediatrician Paul Offit set out to quantify the capacity of the infant immune system, which is already known to be quite impressive. Infants are exposed to an onslaught of bacteria the moment they leave the womb, even before they exit the birth canal. Any infant who does not live in a bubble is likely to find the everyday work of fighting off infection more taxing than processing weakened antigens from multiple immunizations.

Offit is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and the head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is the coinventor of a vaccine, the author of several books about vaccination, and a former member of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices. He is also, if you believe the Internet, a “Devil’s servant” known as “Dr. Proffit.” He earned this distinction, along with some credible death threats, by being an outspoken advocate for vaccination.

Offit is associated with the devil on a website that also compiles evidence that the Holocaust was a hoax and that anti-Semitism was invented by Zionists as a justification for the creation of Israel. Accusations that Offit is a “vaccine profiteer” are generated by a blogger named J. B. Handley, himself no stranger to profit. Handley, a venture capitalist, is the cofounder of a private equity firm with over $1 billion under management as well as the cofounder of Generation Rescue, an autism advocacy organization.

In his book Autism’s False

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