Tuberculosis was almost totally stamped out before people started refusing to vaccinate their children. Now it seems that we’re going to have Corona with us for a long while because some people don’t believe in the vaccine. Some of them are in my family. There’s nothing to discuss because both sides are firm in their beliefs. One because of the body’s gradual natural resistance to disease and one because black people were experimented upon in the Tuskegee studies of 1932. I can’t really argue with the latter – it makes sense to be wary of a government that used a race for experimentation. (It also makes sense that everyone is getting the same vaccine so why not you) But the former one really scares me. There are too many things a human body does not learn to fight against. I keep thinking about Adelaide Crapsey, who was infected with TB at the beginning of the twentieth century. The cover of my book on her had the following poem

and if we want to go natural, we have to accept the fact that death is nature’s way of slowing us down.