On Immunity : An Inoculation (9781555973278) (20 page)

Page 40

One of the appeals of alternative medicine is that it offers not just an alternative philosophy or an alternative treatment but also an alternative language:
I do not intend to suggest that there are not other reasons why we turn to alternative medicine, but I am interested in how the marketing of alternative medicine exploits our fears. This marketing is not without its ironies, as when the chemicals used to cleanse the body of toxins in chelation therapy prove to be toxic.

Alternative medicine in this country has its roots in the Popular Health Movement of the 1830s. This movement was, as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English write in
For Her Own Good
, a response to both the professionalization of medicine and the dangers of early nineteenth-century medicine. A number of alternative practices emerged during this period, including homeopathy and hydropathy, as well as Sylvester Graham’s system of eating whole grains and fresh vegetables and avoiding all drugs and herbal remedies. With the exception of homeopaths, who often embraced vaccination because it supported their theory that “like cures like,” many alternative health practitioners were expressly opposed to vaccination.

The most popular alternative practice was promoted by Samuel Thomson, who wanted to free medicine from the marketplace and democratize it so that each person could be his or her own healer. Nearly a quarter of all Americans subscribed to this philosophy at its height, but by the end of the 1830s Thomsonians had, as Ehrenreich and English write, “succumbed to the very forces they had set out to challenge. Where once they had denounced the transformation of healing into a commodity, now they sought to package their own alternative into a new commodity.”

This legacy lives on in our contemporary alternative health movement, which promotes vitamins and supplements that cost Americans $30 billion a year, are produced by some of the same companies that produce pharmaceuticals, and amount to a large—and largely unregulated—industry.

Page 40

Commentators on national television were insisting that same-sex marriage was “unnatural” even on the day the Supreme Court determined that a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. This decision, Justice Antonin Scalia argued in his dissent, sprang from a “diseased root.” Clearly, there is a punitive moralism hiding behind both our understanding of what is natural and what it means to be diseased.

Page 41

“In the pharmaceutical world,” the writer Jane Smith observes, “the great division is between biologicals and chemicals”:
In her book
Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine
, Smith expands on this further: “Biologicals are tricky to produce, expensive to store, and easy to get wrong.” Drug companies, she notes, get out of the business of biologicals whenever they can. “They live off the chemicals. Chemicals let you sleep easy at night and wake up rich in the morning.”

Page 43

Carson may have overstated some of the dangers of DDT:
In
The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism
, the political scientist Charles Rubin details a few cases in which Rachel Carson distorted her information or misrepresented her sources. She cited a letter to the editor of a medical journal, for example, as if it were a scientific report. And she implied that a study on leukemia had led to conclusions that were counter to the conclusions the author of the study had made. Carson did not misrepresent all her sources, as Rubin makes clear, but her case was not as unequivocal as she made it seem.

Page 47

I understood it as a broader question of belonging:
As a poet who writes in prose, or a prose writer informed by poetry, I have often found myself confronted with the question of belonging. 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. To this end, I have tried to heed Alice Walker’s lines “Be nobody’s darling; / Be an outcast.” The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.

Page 50

And perhaps we have never been modern, either:
The anthropologist Bruno Latour’s book
We Have Never Been Modern
is what Haraway is referencing when she writes, “We have never been human.”

Page 56

“The body is not a battlefield,” Susan Sontag warns in
AIDS and Its Metaphors.
Bad metaphors, she contends, can disrupt our understanding of our bodies. Not all metaphors distort illness equally, and not all are damaging, but Sontag finds the war metaphor uniquely destructive. “It over-mobilizes, it overdescribes, and it powerfully contributes to the excommunicating and stigmatizing of the ill,” she writes. “Give it back to the war-makers.”

Page 62

a report on vaccine side effects, which concluded its brief historical overview of child mortality with the observation that now “children are expected to survive to adulthood”:
This is from “Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality” (see note to page 35), which notes that in 1900, in the United States, 100 out of every 1,000 babies would die before their first birthdays, and 5 more would die before the age of five. By 2007, those numbers had fallen to less than 7 out of every 1,000 babies who would die before their first birthdays, and only .29 more before the age of five. “Diseases severe enough to kill children and adults can also leave survivors disabled in some way,” the report observes, “and as mortality has fallen, so has the chance of severe disability from these diseases.”

Page 67

Most of my information and much of my thinking about the history of women and medicine was drawn from
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women
by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. I also relied on their earlier book
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers.
The introduction to the second edition of that book quotes the historian John Demos, who observes that a quarter to a third of the women tried for witchcraft in colonial New England were known for their abilities as healers or midwives. “The underlying linkage here is obvious enough,” Demos writes. “The ability to heal and the ability to harm seemed intimately related.” As, I would argue, they still do.

Page 70

an investigative journalist discovered that Wakefield had been paid for his research by a lawyer preparing a lawsuit against a vaccine manufacturer:
This journalist was Brian Deer, and the amount Wakefield was paid by Richard Barr’s law firm was $800,000. In pursuit of evidence for a lawsuit, this firm gave $10 million to doctors and scientists researching a link between vaccination and autism. In
Autism’s False Prophets
, Paul Offit details where that money went. Over $1 million went to Unigenetics Limited, the company that tested Wakefield’s samples. Kenneth Aitken, a pathologist who argued for Britain to change its vaccination policy based on Wakefield’s research, received $400,000. And Marcel Kinsbourne, a neurologist who supported Wakefield’s hypothesis, received $800,000.

Page 75

Barbara Loe Fisher is president of the National Vaccine Information Center, which is not, as its name might suggest, a federal agency. “Its relationship with the US government,” the journalist Michael Specter writes, “consists almost entirely of opposing federal efforts aimed at vaccinating children.” In the spring of 2011, a CBS jumbotron in Times Square began displaying an advertisement with the image of a woman cradling an infant next to the words
Vaccines: Know the risks.
This was followed by the word
Vaccination
superimposed over the Statue of Liberty along with the tagline “Your Health. Your family. Your choice.” The logo and website address for the NVIC, present on the screen for the entire ad, then filled the frame.

The educational materials compiled on the NVIC website suggest that vaccination may cause, among other things, autism and diabetes. “Taking what NVIC says about vaccines at face value,” the physician and journalist Rahul Parikh observes, “is akin to believing Joe Camel when he tells you that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer.” This might seem at first like a flawed comparison, in that antivaccine activists do not appear to be selling a product. But fear is an intangible that sells any number of products, and the possibility that someone has a vested interest in widespread fear of vaccination is evidenced in the Times Square ad itself, which includes on every frame the website address for the cosponsor, the physician Joseph Mercola.

Mercola runs the Mercola Natural Health Center in the suburbs of Chicago, though he himself no longer sees patients. Since 2006, he has devoted most of his time to his website, which hosts articles on the dangers of water fluoridation, metal amalgam dental fillings, and vaccines, with numerous forays into less-traveled terrain including a theory that AIDS is not caused by HIV. This site draws about 1.9 million visitors per month, as Bryan Smith observes in his article “Dr. Mercola: Visionary or Quack?” The products available for purchase range from tanning beds to air purifiers to vitamins and supplements. The website and Mercola LLC generated an estimated $7 million in 2010, and in 2011 Mercola donated $1 million to a number of organizations, including the NVIC.

Page 75

Jenny McCarthy, who maintains that she is not antivaccine but “anti-toxins” led a 2008 march in Washington, DC, organized around the theme “Green Our Vaccines.” The march and its slogan, which the physician David Gorski calls “wonderfully Orwellian,” illustrate how modes of resistance can be co-opted for purposes other than meaningful resistance. McCarthy’s antivaccine movement borrows from the rhetoric of environmentalism without engaging in environmentalist action, in the same manner that the earlier antivaccine movement in Britain borrowed from the rhetoric of abolitionism without engaging in abolitionist action.

Page 78

For quite some time, all I knew about the complication I suffered following my son’s birth was that it is called uterine inversion and that it is very rare. It is also, apparently, featured on the final episode of the television show
ER
, which my midwife discouraged me from watching because the woman with uterine inversion dies in surgery after giving birth. When I asked the obstetrician who operated on me whether I should expect this complication to happen again with another baby, she told me that nobody knows enough to say for sure. My midwife, who had attended thousands of births, had never witnessed a uterine inversion before my son’s birth. Several years would pass before I would learn that this particular complication happens in about 1 out of 3,000 births. And in around 15 percent of those cases, the mother dies.

Page 82

Privilege, too, is a positional good, and some have argued that health is as well:
The concept of positional goods was explained to me by my sister, who referred me to an article by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift titled “Equality, Priority, and Positional Goods.” This article explains that health, unlike education, is not widely understood as a positional good. “In fact, however, one’s health does have competitive value,” the authors argue. “Fit and healthy people are, other things being equal, more likely to succeed in the competition for jobs and other scarce goods. Indeed, some social scientists have suggested that health is an important element in the complicated causal story that explains why economically successful parents tend to have economically successful children. Children of wealthy parents tend to be healthier than children of poor parents, and their being so helps to explain why they do better at school and in the labor market. If that is so, and health is indeed a determinant of children’s differential chances of achieving better or worse rewarded occupational positions, then health does indeed have a competitive, and hence positional, aspect. The value to me of my health does depend on how healthy others are. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

Page 83

Thirty years after routine vaccination for smallpox ceased in the United States, the government asked researchers at the University of Iowa to test the remaining stores of the vaccine for efficacy:
President George W. Bush was vaccinated against smallpox in 2002, as part of a plan to immunize 10 million police and health workers. This plan was never realized, in part because of resistance from public health officials, nurses’ unions, and hospitals. “The president’s vaccination was a highly politicized public health gesture, a symbolic act demonstrating that Saddam Hussein’s capabilities and plans were real and evil enough to justify aggression against his regime,” Arthur Allen writes in his book
Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver.
The government had no evidence that Saddam had access to smallpox, but the possibility that he might was used to justify both a dubious vaccination campaign and the invasion of Iraq. “This was how we came,” Allen writes, “at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to vaccinate our president against an extinct disease.”

Page 96

Vaccination allows us to use the products of capitalism for purposes that are counter to the pressures of capital:
In the last line of “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” from her book
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
, Eve Sedgwick points hopefully toward what we can learn from “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”

Page 99

If
paternalism
is a dirty word,
maternalism
is also somewhat soiled by its association with a time period in which women had to justify their work as activists by arguing that they were “naturally” inclined to protect other people. “By the latter 19th century in the United States, maternalism began to take on sociopolitical connotations,” Carolyn Weber writes in her entry on
maternalism
for the
Encyclopedia of Gender and Society
, “so that the term came to denote a school of activism in which women, to fight for public causes, appealed to the qualities they believed were inherent to their gender. As a result,
maternalists
are seen as women who take mothering outside the home and into their communities for the larger social good.”