Anti-Vaxxers: Enjoying the Privilege of Putting Everyone at Risk

Here’s the fun thing: I get to do this for the next seven months. My kid isn’t old enough to receive an MMR yet, relying on the immunity of the kid and adult herd around him to keep measles from floating into his face and down his lungs, and in the meantime I have to repeatedly undertake a dire existential calculus. Do I wait for my wife to get home and leave my son with her so I can go to the store and pick things up? What kind of restaurants can we go to? Should I try to book certain appointment times at the doctor? Can I risk leaving my kid at a daycare now and then, or should I take him everywhere with me, and is one riskier than the other? And what about my own behavior? Should I travel for work anymore? If I do, should I stay with someone else for a few days before coming home? What communal activities become less safe as more people opt out of a system designed to create and reinforce communal health? At what point does others’ narcissistic self-expression drive everyone else homeward and inward, making us all dependent on and terrified of exiting autonomous family states?

None of this is natural-disaster calculus. None of this involves weighing being in public versus the chance that someone may engage in a public terror strike with bombs or even handguns and rifles. This is dread processed through the normative conduct of being a citizen. Nobody has to form a requisite malicious intent for my son to be at risk of death or disfigurement. They just have to be selfish, or misinformed, or more terrified that their kids might turn out less than neurotypical and that that might be a hardship. Then they merely have to be nearby, where breath can atomize and virulence spew. 

When his time on the schedule comes, I will vaccinate my son with extreme prejudice, with the faint sympathetically magical hope that my enthusiasm for doing so radiates far beyond him and binds and defends all the children he may one day giggle near and hold hands with. And maybe this backfires for me, and he winds up on a neurological spectrum. If that should happen — pace actual science — I will be forever riven with guilt that I might have foisted a condition on him that he might never have had. But that will be the downside of my own pernicious tendency to believe that I owe it not only to him but to a common weal, and that the commonwealth I contribute to as a citizen owes it back to me and him just as dearly. And if something should happen, I trust that I will not blame an injection for it, because finding horror in events proximal to you for no other reason than that they are there seems as inherently reasonable as saying, “He took poorly because the redhead woman gave ‘im the evil eye, she did.” 

What I will not do, however, is gamble with his immunity and the immunity of dozens or hundreds or thousands of others — both infant and elderly, all less capable of defending themselves — to assuage my guilt about what could happen by the lights of perverted science. Even if I could probably sell a car or get a mortgage to cover any catastrophic medical bills that ensue. Because that solipsistic reading of science and suffering is the most repugnant and most destructive vision of privilege: when what might be inexorable and mortal to everyone else is something worth my countenancing, because it doesn’t have to apply to me. Because, in your house, all the bad things might be fatal — whereas in my house they’re just optional.