Revenge of the Tipping Point summary

Epidemics are contagious. They spread across city boundaries, state lines, and national borders. Give a virus in Wuhan, China, a couple of weeks and a few international airline tickets and it’ll soon be infecting people in Paris, New York, and Tel Aviv. So here’s our first puzzle: why didn’t the bank-robbing fever that gripped L.A. spread to other American cities? 

One part of the answer to that question takes us to New England. 

California maintains a public database of vaccination rates in its middle schools. Most kids in most public schools, it shows, are fully vaccinated against infectious diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella by the time they reach seventh grade. It’s the same in the private system, with one exception: Waldorf schools that apply the “holistic” learning philosophy of the twentieth-century Austrian educator Rudolf Steiner. On average, Waldorf pupils are sixty-five percent less likely to be vaccinated than their peers in other schools. 

The simplest explanation is that vaccine-skeptical parents seek out like-minded educators, but that’s not what’s going on according to Elisa Sobo, an anthropologist who has spent years researching Waldorf schools. Sobo argues that parents pick up opposition to vaccination from the schools themselves. Her work documents a pattern among parents with multiple kids enrolled in Waldorf schools: each subsequent child receives fewer vaccinations than the last. 

January 2020. A student at the University of Massachusetts returns to the U.S. after spending the holidays with family in Wuhan, China. He lands at Logan airport, waits for his suitcase in the crowded baggage claim area, stands in line at immigration with hundreds of others, and finally boards a packed bus headed downtown. No one’s wearing a mask or social distancing. 

It looks like a public health disaster in the making, but it’s not. Boston’s first documented case of COVID hits a brick wall. The student doesn’t infect anyone; the virus fails to spread. By February 2020, there are 120 unique strains of COVID in the Boston metropolitan area. Most fizzle out like the student’s. Even ultra-virulent strains are strangely self-contained. One of the worst ravages a nursing home, killing 24 residents, but then it… stops.

Aerosolists, scientists who study air droplets, can help us answer that question. Before we talk about viruses, though, we need to look at cars. 

In 2006, Donald Stedman, an aerosolist at the University of Denver, set up a self-made contraption on the side of a highway. Stedman’s device used infrared light to instantly measure and analyze the emissions of passing vehicles. If they were fitted with the correct pollution-control equipment, the word “good” flashed up on a screen. When a heavy polluter sped past, the word “poor” appeared.