Phillipp Osten: Pockengift. Geschichten aus der Berliner Impfbibliothek, in: Kursbuch 206 (June 2021), p. 20-46.
From the journal’s editorial:
“Vaccination is hope. Vaccination is almost eschatologically charged. Will it bring us the end of the pandemic? We hope so, but admittedly we don’t know. The virus eludes us through mutation, the vaccine through ordering and production problems, and the organization of vaccination could have begun more efficiently. Vaccination is a technique that makes an organism more resistant, more resilient. A vaccinated organism can decode threatening information and act against it. Immune systems can only act against threats they know about, they do not even register other threats – vaccinations are information gathering techniques, they enlighten an organism about what might be coming and stimulate the formation of antibodies. This coursebook is about such vaccines – but not only vaccines in the classical immunological sense, but also other immune reactions and the question of whether there can be vaccines of different shapes for them.”
Among many other essays, Phillipp Osten’s contribution is “about the history of vaccination as a history of acceptance and doubt.”