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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Eula Biss Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator.

– Eula Biss

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

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

I think that protecting children at the age where they’re most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent.

– Eula Biss

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

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

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

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

One of the shortcomings of our medical system is that doctors have very little time with their patients.

– Eula Biss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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