We Are All In This Together
What I read: Immunity, Interdependence, and the Shared Root of Our Safety and Our Sanity: Eula Biss on the Science and Social Dynamics of Health as Communal Trust by Maria Popova on Brain Pickings.
If you ever want to treat yourself to beautiful writing from a brilliant mind, read the writings of Maria Popova on her always enlightening and popular blog, Brain Pickings. I subscribe to many blogs, but none make me open a post as quickly as a notification from Brain Pickings. I am always astonished that one mind can produce such stunning prose that opens so many gateways into a better understanding of the world’s books and the experience of life generally.
Savor a bit of Popova’s facility with words and ideas as she begins her post…
Months after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened humanity to the delicate interdependence of nature, Dr. King awakened humanity to our delicate dependence on each other. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality [and] whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” he wrote from his cell at the Birmingham City Jail.
When Robert Hooke looked at a piece of cork through an early handcrafted leather-and-gold microscope in 1665, he named the strange irregular “pores” of its honeycomb-like tissue structure cells, after the small adjacent spaces in which monks spend their voluntary solitary confinement. It would take another two centuries for scientists to discover that cells are the basic biological units of life, that they are in constant osmotic communication with one another, and that they replicate themselves to become new cells, each a whispered word from the language in which life talks to the future.
Isn’t that gorgeous writing?
Later in the post Popova introduces the crux of her reason for writing the piece, using messaging from Eula Biss’s book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, to illuminate the modern coronavirus pandemic experience in which we are all deeply and nonconsensually entrenched.
That delicate interdependence of life and lives, with its tangled roots in biology and cultural history, is what Eula Biss explores in On Immunity: An Inoculation (public library) — a book of penetrating and poetic insight, drawn with that rare scholarship capable of correcting the warped cultural hindsight we call history; a book of staggering foresight, conceived in the wake of the H1N1 flu pandemic, yet speaking with astonishing prescience to the complex epidemiological realities and social dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding more than five years after its publication.
As we all experience the rollout of vaccines around the world, admittedly with varying degrees of rapidity, the insight Biss offers, and Popova highlights, are important. Vaccines do not exist in a vacuum. They are pharmaceutical tools that are only as effective as the vaccinated population allows and champions.
Echoing Hillary Clinton’s often restated axiom, “It takes a village,” from her 1996 book of the same title, Biss points out how widespread vaccinations are a communal and collective effort by an intersection of populations to help not only themselves but their neighbors, their friends, and indeed the entirety of the rest of the world with whom they will never speak or make contact.
The unvaccinated person is protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which disease is not circulating. But a vaccinated person surrounded by bodies that host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or fading immunity. We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here. Donations of blood and organs move between us, exiting one body and entering another, and so too with immunity, which is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.
When President Biden urges everyone to be vaccinated when it is their turn, he is rightfully signaling that we are all in this together. It quite literally takes a village to address the pandemic, and that village is essentially both those in our immediate sphere and those who may be one, two, or with a hat tip to Kevin Bacon, six degrees of separation from us. We are our brother’s keeper, as they old saying goes. (Although these days I try to avoid using gendered verbiage, but you get my point.)
Typically, we hear that the goal for which our country and the world should be striving is herd immunity, the concept that when a certain percentage of the population has become immune to an infection, either through past exposure or vaccination, it reduces the likelihood that those without such immunity are also less likely to become ill through infection. Biss bristles a bit at the word “herd,” its association with cattle, and the phrase “herd mentality” which she describes as “a stampede to stupidity.” Let’s face it, we have all witnessed far too many demonstrations of the herd’s lockstep adherence to some rather stupid ideas and beliefs.
So, Biss offers a better, more humanistic metaphor for such widespread immunity, bees and their hives.
If we were to exchange the metaphor of the herd for a hive, perhaps the concept of shared immunity might be more appealing. Honeybees are matriarchal, environmental do-gooders who also happen to be entirely interdependent. The health of any individual bee, as we know from the recent epidemic of colony collapse, depends on the health of the hive.
Now that is a metaphor I can support. We are not mindless immune cattle but rather a worldwide hive that only thrives through the interconnectedness of our intentions and actions. In this case, getting vaccinated is an act of service to the common good, which of course serves us rather well too.
Biss is clear that,
Vaccination works by enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.
Yet, Popova points out that starting in the 1990s Andrew Wakefield sadly “infected the hive mind” when he dangerously proclaimed that vaccines cause autism. It was later revealed that Wakefield’s research was underwritten by a lawyer preparing for a lawsuit against a vaccine manufacturer, but the damage was done.
When such unfounded claims spew forth into the media and social media ether, they do their damage to sensibility and those who grab onto those untruths are too often unwillingly to entertain facts and reason. Maintaining the lie feeds their confirmation bias. Thus, the lie lives on and it is up to the scientists and truth tellers to forever chip away at the ignorance.
Popova suggests that Biss offers a rather generous interpretation of the ignorance of anti-vaxxers in her own assessment of anti-vaccination:
Those who went on to use Wakefield’s inconclusive work to support the notion that vaccines cause autism are not guilty of ignorance or science denial so much as they are guilty of using weak science as it has always been used — to lend false credibility to an idea that we want to believe for other reasons.
Throughout the piece Popova uses her own words and Biss’s to make a strong case for everyone to be vaccinated against COVID-19, even if that is not explicitly therein stated.
So, it is going to come as no surprise to you that I am advocating for you and everyone in your family and friends circle to get vaccinated when it is your turn and you have access to the vaccine.
Here is a great national (United States) vaccine finder site run by Boston Children’s Hospital in partnership with Harvard Medical School, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Castlight Health. Most states and cities have similar sites that allow you to find vaccination locations nearest you.
We can emerge from this pandemic, but it does indeed take a village to do so.