Top 76 Eula Biss Quotes
#1. There's this tendency to think of the individual and the collective are somehow at odds or separate. But I think that's really false. We're all both. And when the individual suffers, the collective suffers, and vice versa.
Eula Biss
#2. I thought, how would I feel if my son gave one of those [underprivileged] kids chicken pox? For him it's not a terrible thing. We have good insurance and easy access to health care. It's a different situation for another family. I didn't want to make the decision for them.
Eula Biss
#3. Mother: "I couldn't stand his friends from medical school. They were all pompous and awkward. They knew how to memorize but they didn't know how to be human. Rochester was cold and ugly. Everything there was the same color. I was incredibly lonely." She
Eula Biss
#4. The study looked at two groups of people, one vaccinated against the flu and the other not vaccinated. After both groups were asked to read an article exaggerating the threat posed by the flu, the vaccinated people expressed less prejudice against immigrants than the unvaccinated people.
Eula Biss
#5. 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
#6. Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?" the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. "They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders." Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk.
Eula Biss
#7. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.
Eula Biss
#8. In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage.
Eula Biss
#9. 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.
Eula Biss
#10. Sonata," he says, "means 'sounding together.' It is an argument in which one theme is presented in opposition to another and they struggle until one wins, in the resolution. It is a beautiful form, it has endured into this century.
Eula Biss
#11. One of the shortcomings of our medical system is that doctors have very little time with their patients.
Eula Biss
#12. Mother: "I'm amazed that more people don't commit suicide. They just keep on living. It's so hard and they just keep doing it." Useful
Eula Biss
#13. 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.
Eula Biss
#14. When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator.
Eula Biss
#15. On the pro-vaccine side - and not everyone does this, but I saw it enough for it to make me really uncomfortable - is a tendency to accuse people who are wary of vaccination of being stupid and not understanding science.
Eula Biss
#16. My own thinking is often clarified and extended by talking with students.
Eula Biss
#17. Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.
Eula Biss
#18. She was poisoned, but the reason she was crying was that her husband didn't want her anymore.
Eula Biss
#19. My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.
Eula Biss
#20. Our community of contagion really is a world community.
Eula Biss
#21. Our constitution got built around the idea of minority protection.
Eula Biss
#22. When the last nationwide smallpox epidemic began in 1898, some people believed that whites were not susceptible to the disease. It was called "Nigger itch," or, where it was associated with immigrants, "Italian itch" or "Mexican bump." When
Eula Biss
#23. I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.
Eula Biss
#24. Words like 'custody' don't mean the same thing to him. I don't want us to own anything together. "You don't want to be happy," he accuses me.
Eula Biss
#25. The belief that public health measures are not intended for people like us is widely held by many people like me. Public health, we assume, is for people with less - less education, less-healthy habits, less access to quality health care, less time and money.
Eula Biss
#26. Bram Stoker's 'Dracula,' in my reading, is really obviously about disease and our relation to disease.
Eula Biss
#27. The risk of getting Hep B from a blood transfusion is a tiny number, but it's a bigger number than the risk of side effects from the vaccine.
Eula Biss
#28. Art-making was part of my daily life from a very young age, and I still love that kind of everyday art-making.
Eula Biss
#29. 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.
Eula Biss
#30. There's something ancient and inevitable about this desire to do whatever you can to protect your child.
Eula Biss
#31. One of the mysteries of hep B immunization is that vaccinating only 'high risk' groups, which was the original public health strategy, did not bring down rates of infection.
Eula Biss
#32. 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.
Eula Biss
#33. 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.
Eula Biss
#34. Some of the most interesting research that I did was about risk assessment and how ordinary citizens like me handle risk assessment and how irregular our risk assessments are.
Eula Biss
#35. But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear.
Eula Biss
#36. In some areas, immunity has been eroded so much that the child who's not vaccinated is now actually more vulnerable to the complications of infectious diseases.
Eula Biss
#37. Yes, there's a higher rate of people living below the poverty line who aren't vaccinated. But it's much rarer for that to be a product of choice than a product of circumstance.
Eula Biss
#39. The release loop was tight, but I thought if I was drowning I would be able to pull anything.
Eula Biss
#40. Yes, we can make prudent choices as parents, but we can't create an environment where there's zero risk for our children. Not only is that impossible, I don't think it's desirable, either.
Eula Biss
#41. Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity
Eula Biss
#42. My son is fully vaccinated, but there is one immunization on the standard schedule that he did not receive on time. This was meant to be his very first shot, the hep B administered to most babies immediately after birth.
Eula Biss
#43. My mother was in the bathtub crying and I was standing outside the door waiting, just in case she decided to slip her head under and keep it there. The other kids were upstairs. The problem was about money, of course. She was afraid she wouldn't have enough for us to eat.
Eula Biss
#44. But for now I prefer to think that I will go somewhere that is not so overimagined.
Eula Biss
#45. Mother: "He used to say that you could lock me in a closet and I'd still get something out of it. I guess that's true." An
Eula Biss
#46. 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.
Eula Biss
#47. If vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love.
Eula Biss
#48. Our willingness to believe the news is, in many cases, not entirely innocent.
Eula Biss
#49. A trust-in the sense of a valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong-captures, more or less, my understanding of what it is to have a child.
Eula Biss
#50. I think there's a temptation to try to think of people who don't vaccinate as a homogenous community, but I'm not convinced that's true. I'm not even sure that the word 'community' is totally accurate there, you know.
Eula Biss
#51. as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." What
Eula Biss
#52. We've been using vaccination in some form for hundreds of years now. We have almost nothing in our modern medicine that we've been using that long, and it's been consistently productive even though, you know, the older vaccines were much more dangerous than vaccines we're using now.
Eula Biss
#53. 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.
Eula Biss
#54. 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
#55. There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.
Eula Biss
#56. If by years of patient suffering, God can manage to take the harshness out of my voice, then the time has been well-spent.
Eula Biss
#57. In the story of Thetis and Achilles, it's clear this isn't really a safe environment. She's gone down to the River Styx - the dead are being ferried across in the background. There's something in this mythology that says that if you want invulnerability, if you want immortality, you pay a price.
Eula Biss
#58. The opportunity to think with another mind is my preferred mode of travel.
Eula Biss
#59. If your child's going to ride in a car or go swimming or play soccer, all of those things involve risk. And if your child doesn't do any of those things, then they're probably sitting too much, and that involves risk, too.
Eula Biss
#60. In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.
Eula Biss
#61. Nigeria and Pakistan are two countries that have had a lot of trouble with polio. And part of the reason is that there's a lot of political unrest, and people really distrust what the government is doing. That has an effect on people's health, and it has an effect on the health of children.
Eula Biss
#62. Observing that we have waged wars on poverty and drugs as well as cancer, Susan Sontag writes, "Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in
Eula Biss
#63. He hears his mother and his sister-in-law talk about how lonely it is to be married to a musician, how many nights they spend alone. He wonders if I would be unhappy. I don't say anything. I like to spend my nights alone.
Eula Biss
#64. Most of us believe that dirt is good for our kids, but some of us are wary of the grass in the parks, which may or may not have been treated with toxic chemicals.
Eula Biss
#65. 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
#66. I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.
Eula Biss
#67. Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared.
Eula Biss
#68. I think that protecting children at the age where they're most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent.
Eula Biss
#69. I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long.
Eula Biss
#70. I was shaking when I asked my mother, "Do you think you eat enough?" She was silent for a long time until she said quietly, "That is between me and God.
Eula Biss
#71. 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.
Eula Biss
#72. There's a cultural expectation that everyone will be immunized, in part to protect the entire population. When people refuse that expectation, they're indulging in a certain kind of political or social immunity.
Eula Biss
#73. I come home to an empty house and fill the sink with water. The pigeons above the window are clucking. I let the dishes slip under the bubbles and I close my eyes. I listen to the perfect, whole, round sounds of glass against porcelain under water.
Eula Biss
#74. 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.
Eula Biss
#75. What I saw when I was doing research is that in pursuit of a middle ground, people will kind of split the difference between the two extremes that they're hearing. And I think what's problematic is that people are seeing vaccinating on schedule, on time, as an extreme position.
Eula Biss
#76. However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other's environment. Immunity is a shared space--a garden we tend together.
Eula Biss
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