Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 469

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations," by Simon Schama.

Haffkine is also, and unapologetically, a Jew from Odessa, and this matters. Fourteenth-century Jew-haters had accused them of poisoning wells, of being demonic instigators of mass death. But here was a Jew who, given the chance, would inoculate the world against it. 

So it was now put about in high circles of British science and government that Waldemar Haffkine was a Good Jew, and what was more, an admirable man, a saintly scientist; the very first to make an effective vaccine for humans against lethal bacterial infections. (Smallpox was viral.) A Jew to be trusted, moreover, since from the start he had demonstrated that he would recommend nothing not already tested on his own person. Accordingly, Haffkine had been the first to be inoculated in 1892 with the cholera vaccine he had developed in the Institut Pasteur.

The modern instalment of the Black Death arrived in Hong Kong in the spring of 1894 the modern way: by steamship, coming from Pakhoi, 300 miles to the west. Along with tea, silk and cotton, their cargoes included Yunnan opium, packed in hemp bales, amid which lodged the usual stowaways: Rattus flavipectus, long-haired yellow-chested rats.1 If the hold also shared space with rice or grain, so much better for them. But the rodents were, in their turn, dining opportunities for their fellow passengers, Xenopsylla cheopsis, the biting flea. Should the flea have taken a meal from a previously infected rat, for instance in Yunnan province, where plague was endemic, the newly infected animal would die and the flea would hop off for an alternative host, animal or human.2 In 1898, another of the students in Elie Metchnikoff’s lab at the Institut Pasteur, Paul-Louis Simond, who had himself survived yellow fever in French Guiana, would discover the plague bacillus in fleas departing from dead rats, establishing the role of insect bites in transmission. But even without benefit of microbiology, the Chinese, especially in Yunnan and the south, treated the sudden appearance of a host of dead rats as the invariable herald of plague. In 1792, the sight of them moved a young poet, Shi Daonan, to write ‘The Death of Rats’: 

Rats die in the east 

Rats die in the west 

People look upon dying rats 

As if they were . . . 

A few days following the death of rats 

People die like city walls 

Do not ask how many people die 

The dim sun is covered by gloomy clouds 

Three people take less than ten steps together 

When two die falling across the road 

People die in the night 

But no one dares weep 

The ghost of plague blows 

The light turns green 

Suddenly the wind rises and the light is blown out 

Leaving man, ghost, corpse and coffin in the same dark room . . .

Just a few months later, Shi was himself infected and rode the fiery dragon into the hereafter.

Haffkine did indeed feel his authority and reputation now lay in ruins. Just two years before, he had been a figure commanding admiration, almost to the point of reverence: invited to take on the founding and directorship of an all-India Research University, funded by the Tata endowment. The government of India had gone along with the scheme to the point of asking him to draw up detailed plans for its operation.23 Now the Viceroy wanted him tried, convicted and executed. But this personal blow was as nothing (so he told himself) compared to the destruction of his life’s mission: the saving of untold numbers with vaccines. His battle all along had been to replace one kind of authority by another. What he had encountered in India was the empire of drastic disinfection, applied, for the most part, invasively, indiscriminately and coercively. He had hoped to replace it with the authority of science, specifically bacteriology, delivered through inoculation to those who consented to receive it. Persuasion rather than coercion, together with the measurable demonstration of protection and mitigation, would transform the lives of those most vulnerable to terrifying waves of infection: the poor of Asia.

It would, of course, be helpful if the two inter-connected crises of our age – the health of our bodies and the health of the earth – could break free from the distorting mirror of populist politics. But if you have got this far in the story, you will know that this is seldom, if ever, the case. The visionary advances of science, including those of virology and bacteriology, occur at an ever-accelerating pace and save lives as they do so. Hard-earned, exhaustively tested, truth, just as Thomas Nettleton, Angelo Gatti and Waldemar Haffkine hoped, always seems on the verge of overtaking error, when its exhilarating progress is sandbagged by indignation about foreign substances deviously introduced into our bodies. What could this be, it is said, other than the invasion of our veins authorised by remote ‘experts’ claiming a monopoly of medical wisdom, but who are, in fact, imposing clinical obedience in the name of Doing Us Good? To those for whom knowledge is conveyed by revelation, the accepted hierarchy of wisdom is all the wrong way round. Discernment begins with the judgements of God, followed by the urgings of common sense (especially pronounced by those on television and social media claiming to speak for it), and only then enlightened by science, always keeping in mind that much of what gets presented as irrefutable fact is, actually, just another set of opinions.

To the most frantic alarmists, champions of vaccination are demons walking among us in lab coats, disguised as politically neutral scientists.3 Pretending to be disinterested public servants, they embed themselves in the hardened silos of the Deep State, surfacing to position themselves close to power. Every so often they appear in public, behind or beside elected officers of state whom, through some dark art, they have convinced to act in ways that curtail liberties, shrink the space of daily life, and interfere in decisions properly belonging to individuals and families: the schooling of children; the choice of whether or not to wear protective clothing. 

The Anthony Faucis of this world. 

Something about inoculators, vaccinators, epidemiologists gets under the skin of public tribunes for whom nothing, certainly not epidemiology, is politics-free. Their fury swells into maddened vehemence to the point where it becomes commonplace to wish inoculators banished, imprisoned or dead. Gatti was accused of spreading the disease he claimed to fight; Lord Curzon expressed the hope that Haffkine would be hanged for what the viceroy judged to be criminal irresponsibility. But no epidemiologist has been subjected to more violent abuse than Anthony Fauci. 

We must hope so, for, even as paranoia about borders and frontiers continues to dominate populist rhetoric, the inseparability of humans – and, for that matter, the indivisibility of humankind and nature – remains the saving imperative of our beleaguered time. That has been my story and it remains my faith. Contrary to what you’ll read in tabloid headlines, or hear in the hoots and yells of social media, in our present historical extremity, there are no foreigners, only familiars: a single precious chain of connection that we snap at our utmost peril.