Feb. 12--I cringed the first time I saw The New Yorker measles cartoon.
A doctor stands over a small boy covered head to toe in red spots and tells his forlorn parents, "If you connect the measles it spells out 'My parents are idiots.'"
My initial cringe wasn't out of solidarity with anti-vaxxers, but sympathy for parents who are unable (very different from unwilling) to have their children vaccinated against the dreaded disease; the children are undergoing chemotherapy and can't handle the extra tax on their immune systems, or they're less than a year old, for example. Parents like those in Palatine, where a number of babies who attend the same day care center have been diagnosed with measles.
The cartoon struck me as insensitive to a group of parents who are, quite likely, scared out of their minds right now.
By the fourth or fifth time the cartoon popped up on my social media feeds, I started to feel something resembling, if not solidarity, perhaps umbrage on behalf of anti-vaxxers.
Idiots? Really?
I remember being terrified to expose my daughter to the flu vaccine, having read various terrifying accounts -- and not exclusively on the Internet -- about perfectly healthy babies suddenly suffering what looked a lot like mercury poisoning after being vaccinated.
I remember feeling great relief, tinged with a hint of skepticism, when I read that thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative, was phased out of single-dose flu vaccines beginning in 1999, six years before my daughter was born.
I accepted every vaccination my pediatrician recommended for both my daughter and my son, born four years later, and I continue to get them annual flu shots. But I wonder, with each shot, whether I am doing the right thing. And I don't feel like an idiot for entertaining that wonder.
Eula Biss' gorgeous 2014 book, "On Immunity" (Graywolf Press), does an extraordinary job unpacking our primal, complicated desire to inoculate our children, from the time Thetis dipped the infant Achilles into the River Styx by his heel up to our modern age of nervous parents waiting hours to vaccinate their children against the H1N1 flu.
Biss, a lecturer at Northwestern University and the daughter of a physician, reveals her own uncertainty over whether to vaccinate her son. She initially forgoes the hepatitis B vaccination, only to realize he could have been at risk for the disease because of his medically complicated birth. She has the shot administered later.
She never comes across as an idiot. She comes across as an intensely thoughtful, deeply loving mother who is aware of her responsibilities both as a parent and as a human who shares space and air with other humans, and whose actions will profoundly affect -- and be affected by -- those fellow humans.
Her book was written before our current nervous, divisive state over measles, but she deals frequently with the debate between those who vaccinate and those who don't.
"The metaphor of a 'war' between mothers and doctors is sometimes used for conflicts over vaccination," she writes. "Depending on who is employing the metaphor, the warring parties may be characterized as ignorant mothers and educated doctors, or intuitive mothers and intellectual doctors, or caring mothers and heartless doctors, or irrational mothers and rational doctors."
She offers multiple examples of seemingly credible experts introducing fear into the conversation -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. penned a piece called "Deadly Immunity," which Salon published and later retracted, Biss reports. Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears, son of famed pediatrician William Sears, offers an alternative vaccination regimen in "The Vaccine Book" and underplays the consequences of contracting measles, she writes.
And, of course, there's British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield's now-retracted study linking the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine to autism. Published in 1998, his report was followed by a decade of investigation into his shoddy work that resulted in the stripping of his medical license.
But just because the reports disappeared doesn't mean parents' fears went with them.
"We have a lot of information available to us -- lay people -- who are reading on these issues, but we don't necessarily have the tools to investigate the integrity of that information," Biss told me by phone earlier this week. "If you want to believe that vaccinating is dangerous -- and I do think people start with a desire to believe that -- you can definitely amass information that will seem to support that belief. That's what makes this such a vexing and difficult subject; people are convinced they have sound information that proves their suspicions."
It's not that they're uninformed. It's that they've likely been misinformed.
"Bob Sears' book appears, on its face, to be a credible document," Biss said. "If you read it closely, and I have, its credibility dissolves. It's definitely not a model of responsible writing or reasoned thinking, but it reads a lot like something that is."
That's not good enough, of course, when lives are at risk. No human should be suffering from measles in the year 2015. We all must do better.
But if our goal, in light of measles outbreaks at Disneyland and in New York City and suburban Cook County, is to encourage more parents to choose vaccines, we'd do well to stop painting them as idiots, Biss says.
"My experience is maybe unusual in that I initially had a pediatrician who was what could probably be described as anti-vaccine," Biss says. "I brought some questions that were honest questions that he answered in a way that was fairly distorted. I would love to say I left him because he didn't believe in vaccinating, but I left him because he treated me like I was dumb. It offended me."
Her new pediatrician, she says, is pro-vaccine, and has carefully explained to Biss why.
"She never seemed to be working from the assumption that I was an idiot," Biss says. "She always talked to me like I was her equal. This is important. I know that it affects me. I know that it affects what I believe and what I don't believe."
In the first chapter of "On Immunity," Biss captures a paradox so many parents know all too well.
"My son's birth," she writes, "brought with it an exaggerated sense of both my own power and my own powerlessness."
We wield a tremendous amount of power with our parenting decisions, even as we are forced to leave a terrifying number of things to chance and luck.
Vaccines dramatically decrease the chance of losing our children to illness, or infecting another parent's beloved child.
I hope the measles outbreak brings more parents to that realization, but I don't think painting them as idiots will get us there.
hstevens@tribpub.com
