On Immunity: An Inoculation Quotes.

1. "That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

2. "Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

3. "And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word 'natural.' This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What 'natural' has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is 'pure' and 'safe' and 'benign'. But the use of 'natural' as a synonym for 'good' is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

4. "Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

5. "If we 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, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

6. "idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you feel about it. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

7. "I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

8. "This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

9. "But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

10. "The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children's book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere."
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation