Immunity: Trusting in science helps us stay free

The history of immunization as a social and health paradigm is long now

‘Immunity’ is one of the words that will dominate 2022, and will remain vulnerable to the skin of Covid variants. Global ambition but somewhat complex. Given this, and as the President of the Higher Institute of Health Silvio Brusaferro has stated on several occasions, “Herd immunity, understood as the level of immunization that eliminates the circulation of the virus, is not a goal we can set ourselves with Sars-Cov-2.A very justified yearning for a return to authentic normality, but which risks – as many epidemiologists point out – to remain, moreover, ‘wishful thinking.’ which has acquired a more biopolitical meaning, especially in our difficult times.
The history of immunization as a social and health paradigm has now been long. After the invention of the vaccine – the smallpox vaccine, which he prepared Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century Within the Euro-American positivist culture and optimism of the late nineteenth century, the hygiene movement builds a model of a healthy society to which it should strive “without condition”. The development of vaccines, prompted by Louis Pasteur’s great discoveries in the field of infectious diseases, has made a tremendous contribution.
The pandemic has reignited the debate about vaccines, and has seen non-vaccination attitudes become furious, becoming a mixture of conspiracies and unscientific irrationality, along with the most diverse fears. And where hostile and anti-regime attitudes appear, which have already been irresponsibly tickled by some leaders populists, and that some “magician’s apprentice” is an ambitious businessman in politics who would like to turn into a banned, anti-vaccine party. In the face of this confusion, which threatens public health, immunity is then a very positive word, indicative of a rational approach to the drama we are going through and confidence in the achievements of science – because it must be repeated again, without vaccines we would be in a terrible situation.

Immunity is in harmony with security, as the desire for it is closely related to the situation Myself Pervasive in each of us, turning it into one of the engines of battle and political propaganda of the fluid and uncertain – and therefore, precisely, insecure – postmodern world. risking—indeed, with fact, in some cases—with a feeble acceptance of the curtailment of certain public and private spaces of liberty—which, in the case of high-tech surveillance capitalism, reveals itself entirely (though often subconsciously) intentionally: voluntary slavery”, in the words of the sixteenth century jurist and philosopher Steven Poiti. So the remarkable biopolitical characterization of the present should also make us think of the dark side of immunization as a “fundamentalist ideology”. Because we must not “immunize” ourselves from the social and the collective dimension which, in all evidence, are the opposite of disease, as a certain political perversion would like to distance, health measure and not “social”. Just as it should not – and cannot – be “immunized” from risk, which is a structural component of existence (from which many large corporations have derived). And therefore, The year 2022 of Immunology as another version of Biopolitics The fundamentalist theory of “zero risk” we would gladly do without.

The author is a sociologist