The New Yorker:

In 2009, at the height of the H1N1 pandemic, a group of researchers in the U.S. and Canada decided to test whether public-health interventions might limit disease-induced prejudice along with disease itself. In one part of the study, members of both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups were asked to read an article that amplified the threats of the pandemic, then complete a survey that assessed their attitudes toward immigrants. The vaccinated subjects, it turned out, exhibited less prejudice than their unvaccinated counterparts. In another part of the study, the researchers determined that defining vaccination in terms of contamination—“the seasonal flu vaccine involves injecting people with the seasonal flu virus”—increased prejudice in subjects concerned about disease, whereas defining it in terms of protection—“the seasonal flu vaccine protects people from the seasonal flu virus”—had no such effect. Initiatives that minimize disease, the researchers concluded, might also end up minimizing discrimination.

Eula Biss cites this imperfect but telling research in “On Immunity,” her mesmerizing book about vaccination, which observes that an innate wariness of perceived out-groups—immigrants, ethnic minorities, people with visible disabilities—amounts to an ancient disease-prevention mechanism. Evolutionary psychologists refer to a “behavioral immune system” that attunes humans to physical differences or unfamiliar behavior, even when it poses no risk. This tendency peaks at moments of particular vulnerability: one study, from 2007, suggests that pregnant women exhibit more xenophobia than usual during the early stages of gestation. Biss quotes Susan Sontag, who wrote that syphilis “was the ‘French Pox’ to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese.” It is no help that popular perceptions of disease depend on metaphors of foreign infiltration. As the anthropologist Emily Martin writes in “Flexible Bodies,” textbooks and magazines tend to depict the body as a site of warfare between “ruthless invaders and determined offenders.”

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