Writing and researching on the cultural history of vaccination and vaccine hesitancy has given a particular edge to my anger as I watch outspoken anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers triumphantly get their vaccines ahead of people who have fought for their validity and necessity.
I've only come to appreciate the immense power of cultural narratives that surround medical practice. How and why we talk about medicine in public matters just as much as the science behind the procedure itself. Good public health has to be accountable to those publics.
I've said this to bioethicists, clinicians, to pre-meds, to my own students in literary studies: if it were reducible to the science itself, we wouldn't have such robust cultures of anti-vaccination and vaccine hesitancy. The virality of these discourses are our shared problem.
Wringing our hands over the supposed novelty of this crisis and the speed with which misinformation spreads in a digital age bypasses the difficult, humbling work of confronting history. None of this is new.
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