93 Quotes by Eula Biss

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.

A vaccine introduces a small amount or a tempered version of the virus into the body - just enough to that the body is able to recognize it and deal with it when it encounters it again in the future.

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.

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.

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.

Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do.

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.

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.