Nora Holzinger

 Through the Looking Glass I remember the day I found out I was unvaccinated.  I was struggling through the digital forms that would allow me to live on campus my freshman year of college, and I had to provide documentation that I was vaccinated appropriately.  I yelled downstairs to ask my mom if she had the documents.  “No” she shouted back.  “What? Where is it? What do you mean” I peppered her, finally leaving my room to come downstairs to the living room. “It doesn’t exist,” she said.  I was stunned.  She walked down the narrow basement stairs to rummage in the filing cabinet that held all my documents, and she returned from the depths of the storage room with a folded yellow card with my name and date of birth on it in her handwriting. Inside, the card was blank except for two lines – a polio vaccination and a tetanus shot at age two.  Living in a state with quite strict rules about vaccine exemptions, I had no choice – I had to get vaccinate...

  Right off the bat, let’s get something straight – I am not a vegan. I followed a vegan diet for about eight years, but I’m not currently.  However, as a public health epidemiologist, I’m starting to wonder if I should go back to veganism. COVID-19, Avian flu, anthrax, mad cow disease, and swine flu are all diseases that have “spilled over” into humans from the animals we eat.  With concern over Avian flu growing and the world still recovering from COVID, I’ve been wondering what long-term pandemic prevention would look like. And continued industrial farming isn’t part of that picture.  A recent article in Nature found that industrial fur farming is a “viral highway” where numerous infectious diseases are circulating - diseases with pandemic potential. Potentially pandemic pathogens are viruses, bacteria, and parasites that could spread quickly and easily in humans and could cause significant sickness and death. With not much difference in the living conditions b...

It’s clear to me that the US government has been studying anti-vaccination, and not just for public health reasons. Last month, Reuters reported that during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 to 2021, the US military used fake anti-vaccination Twitter/X profiles to discourage COVID-19 vaccine uptake in developing nations, including the Philippines.  The Pentagon employed the most classic anti-vaccination talking points that I also found in my anthropological work among anti-vaxx and vaccine refusing parents in rural Arkansas right before the COVID-19 pandemic.  In the summer of 2019 (halcyon pre-pandemic times!), I spent about ten weeks living in a small rural community in the Arkansas Ozarks, conducting interview and visiting homes and community gathering places, in order to learn more about the manifestation of anti-vaccination in a rural setting. As a former unvaccinated child myself, I was curious about how rural vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination differed from the more...