Last February, Peter Jüni, then scientific director of the Ontario Science Advisory Table, said on a CBC radio phone show that “we continue to weave a carpet of immunity.”

As a health humanities researcher working on how COVID-19 informs our cultural imagination of immunity, I was struck by Jüni’s metaphor. Now, with his impending departure coinciding with the end of the mask and vaccine mandates, I find myself reconsidering the metaphor.

At a time when authorities are advising individuals to make their own risk assessments as we head into a sixth wave of COVID-19, public health messaging has never been more important.

Jüni’s metaphorical “immunity carpet” conjured up the image of something meticulously crafted and spreading protectively across our region. He also illustrated how the language of public health can invite the public to think differently about immunity, a complex biological system that the pandemic has propelled into everyday life.

Language, metaphor and health

Language matters. Theorists have been making this argument for decades in relation to cancer, AIDS, and the cultural representation of the disease more generally. Language can often distort our understanding of fundamental health and medical concepts, especially in the case of immunity.

Philipp Dettmer, founder of the science education YouTube channel Kurzgesagt and author of Immunesays of immunity: “…people don’t have a good mental picture of what the term means. They see it as an energy shield that you can recharge. But that’s not a thing at all, it’s is a multitude of things.”

As a way to make sense of something we cannot see, metaphor often mediates our understanding of immunity. Seeking a more appropriate way to imagine immunity, Eula Biss, author of “On Immunity: An Inoculation,” offers the naturalistic image of the “garden” as an alternative to the standard fortress metaphor. The image of the garden (based on an ecological understanding of immunity) suggests something between the natural and the artificial. As Biss explains, “The antibodies that generate immunity after vaccination are made in the human body, not in factories. Using ingredients from organisms, living or still living, vaccines prompt the immune system to produce its own protection.”

Vaccines aren’t perfectly natural, but neither are they “unnatural,” despite arguments from wellness communities. By rejecting vaccines, these groups tend to glorify an idea of ​​bodily purity based on the frequent misappropriation and misrepresentation of Eastern spirituality.

This notion of the individual body’s ability to boost its “natural immunity” has further fueled resistance to public health measures and restrictions.

Weave the carpet

A garden, by its very nature, is cultivated but can easily become wild if not maintained. But a “carpet that we weave together” elegantly evokes work and art. By suggesting that we have a role to play in shaping something rather than just being attacked by a virus, this formulation perhaps offers an antidote to the pandemic-induced feelings of helplessness that are apparently fueling anti-virus protests. -mandate.

This metaphor also avoids the divide between the artificial and the natural by interweaving the two forms of immunity (acquired either through exposure to infection or vaccination) into something figuratively spun on a loom.

Jüni’s metaphor also seemed strategic in its reassuring domesticity: what could be more banal than a rug? In this sense, “rug immunity” rejects politicians’ standard militaristic imagery of vaccines as the first line of defense against COVID-19 and its variants.

In its banality, the image captured what it means to live with the virus. In a biological sense, we “live with” the virus through our immune system, which has had the opportunity to familiarize itself with SARS-CoV-2 under the controlled conditions afforded by vaccine mandates and deployments.

Immunity as a shared goal and responsibility

From the early days of the pandemic, public health struggled with its messages about mandates. But Jüni’s metaphor clearly calls us to work together. Emerging from the pandemic, this formulation emphasizes mutual responsibility and invites thinking of immunity in social terms rather than simply individual ones.

However, this is a more difficult undertaking than one might expect. Immunity is informed and overlaid with political and legal meanings dating back to ancient Rome and filtered through Enlightenment thought.

As gender studies professor Ed Cohen reflects in “A Body Worth Defending,” an idea of ​​“immunity as defense” responsible for maintaining clear boundaries around the individual has been entrenched in Western thought since the 19th century.

Interestingly, the phrase “rug immunity” has hitherto been applied to immunity in precisely this original legal sense. A quick Google search reveals multiple uses of the phrase “immunity red carpet” to mean the exemption of high-level politicians and executives from prosecution. In this double sense, the anti-vaccination discourse positions the sovereign and robust organism as impervious to both infection and responsibility.

Yet the imagination of scientists about herd immunity posits the exact opposite of exemption (in a social rather than a medical sense). we leave behind.

The idea of ​​”mat immunity” captures the varied complexities of shared immune systems. It is in its own way a unifying image in the weaving of antibodies induced by infection and vaccination. Taken together, these antibodies could over time give our society some protection against Omicron, its currently burgeoning BA.2 subvariant, and subsequent strains of the novel coronavirus.

Finally, “a rug we weave together” evokes the image of artisans working nearby to create something both functional and ornamental. This collectivist metaphor offers an aesthetically appealing alternative to the more familiar “herd immunity,” which is increasingly seen as out of reach. She invites us to imagine immunity as a collaborative project, expanding to protect those among us for whom the end of warrants means increased vulnerability.

More importantly, this language challenges us to imagine what a post-pandemic future might look like if we commit to continuing to build a “rug of immunity” through vaccination, rather than undoing it as it remains a work in progress. As Peter Jüni prepares to leave the Ontario Science Advisory Table on COVID-19, he leaves behind a model of how effective public health messaging can reshape ideas about our bodies and communities and affect our daily practices (if we choose to listen).

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.