A sudden and mysterious outbreak of communicable illness started lately in my condominium constructing in Manhattan. Three 7-year-olds, a boy and two women, have been sharing the elevator in the future with a caretaker and a random grownup (me). The boy was leaning in opposition to the again of the elevator, between the 2 women. “Assist! I’m in a woman sandwich,” he mentioned. “If I’m not cautious, I’m going to get cooties!”
“Youngsters nonetheless play Cooties?” I requested, shocked that cooties weren’t a relic of my Boomer childhood however had endured into the twenty first century, nonetheless sparking alarm, feigned or actual, among the many younger. “Yeah-huh,” the boy mentioned. One of many women piped up: “I understand how to provide a cootie shot.” She demonstrated on her personal shoulder, her approach a little bit of a blur.
The youngsters and their caretaker acquired off on their ground, leaving me to ponder the cootie phenomenon for the primary time in lots of many years. Past being amused, I used to be struck by the morbid salience of a kids’s recreation that mimics an infection at a time when vaccine skepticism is on the rise and an outbreak of a non-pretend illness, measles, is threatening the lives of youngsters within the Southwest. I discovered that there’s a vibrant if slender slice of educational literature on “preadolescent cootie lore,” as one scholar places it, and that this goofy grade-school fixation is extra intently tied to actual public-health issues than you may assume in case your cootie experience derives solely from the playground.
What precisely are cooties? Since at the very least the Sixties, discipline researchers have collected definitions of various specificity from grammar-school respondents: “boys’ germs,” “women’ germs,” “one thing that kills you,” “like germs, it has germs on it,” “the place any individual licks the underside of the chair or eats paper.” Different consultants communicate of cooties in additional anthropological phrases. The College of Wisconsin at Milwaukee folklorist Simon J. Bronner has characterised cooties as a “ritualized affliction.” Of their seminal 1976 guide, One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of American Kids, Herbert and Mary Knapp described cooties as a type of sport. “There are not any supervised Cootie leagues, however extra individuals in america have performed Cooties than have performed baseball, basketball, and soccer mixed,” they wrote. “It’s our unofficial nationwide recreation.”
By Mary Knapp and Herbert Knapp
Cooties actually have one thing to do with hygiene. In line with a (considerably gross) evaluation by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, an anthropologist on the New College for Social Analysis, cooties are “a social contaminant that move from one youngster to a different,” made up of “the invisible particulates related to germs, farts, or ‘boogers.’” They appear to attract upon kids’s anxieties about sickness and docs but additionally gender, reflecting the complicated mixture of flirtation and social opprobrium hooked up to boy-girl relations (and never completely absent from grownup life). Past that, Hirschfeld concludes, “Cootie lore is just not conceptually orderly.”
Cootie historical past is clearer. The phrase itself started life as a British colonial time period, in all probability a corruption of kutu, a Malay phrase for lice and different biting bugs. American troopers picked it up, because it have been, from their allies throughout World Battle I. A New York Instances report from 1918, headlined “Doughboys Lose Cooties,” described troopers who “scratch with a vengeance” lining up at a “Disinfecting Plant” run by the American Pink Cross. One “lanky New England lad” exclaims, “I’ve acquired all of the cooties in France.” Within the Nineteen Twenties, video games referencing cooties turned well-liked at bridal showers, in honor of grooms who had served in Europe (and in addition provoked, maybe, by sublimated anxiousness about different communicable ailments they could have introduced house). One model concerned drawing separate components of a bug, based mostly on rolls of a cube, till a winner had a accomplished louse. This apply advanced into Cootie, the sport by which youngsters assemble plastic bugs with fiddlehead-fern-like proboscises, which was launched nationwide in 1949 and remains to be manufactured right this moment.
The invisible-particulate type of cooties seems to have hit American playgrounds someday within the Nineteen Thirties, however surveys counsel that it didn’t turn out to be ubiquitous till the early ’50s, on the top of the polio epidemic. Earlier than the polio vaccine was launched in 1955, tens of 1000’s of youngsters have been catching the illness yearly; 1000’s of them died, and extra have been left paralyzed. In his guide Explaining Traditions: People Conduct in Fashionable Tradition, Bronner writes that cooties and cootie photographs—“circle circle, dot dot” being one basic formulation—have been a method for kids “to dramatize the dread of the illness.” Cooties was additionally well-liked through the ’80s, when youngsters have been listening to rather a lot about AIDS.
By Simon J. Bronner
This type of imitative play—not simply Cooties but additionally Home or Cops and Robbers—helps kids make sense of the world. Like nursery rhymes, it will also be commentary, even a type of satiric outsider artwork. As Iona Opie, a pioneering British kids’s folklorist, as soon as noticed: “Step into the playground; a type of defiant lightheartedness envelops you. The kids are … making enjoyable of life.” This was apparently very a lot the case through the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Bronner instructed me that whereas faculties have been shut down and youngsters have been remoted at house, they started sending each other memes by which cooties tended to signify a type of generalized pandemic funk. Furthermore, the senders typically depicted themselves as infants—in Bronner’s interpretation, a humorous expression of their frustration at not with the ability to do regular child issues.
I suppose it’s comforting that, 5 years after COVID-19 was first declared a pandemic, my elevator acquaintances had returned to an in-person fashion of cootie play, performing out their venerable parody of an infection and defending themselves with photographs within the arm. However the epidemiological satire takes on an particularly darkish forged when it expresses extra religion within the energy of vaccination than does the present secretary of Well being and Human Companies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy has dismissed the scientifically confirmed efficacy of the polio vaccine as “mythology,” regardless of polio having been thought of eradicated within the U.S. since 1979. (Earlier than he was confirmed, a spokesperson famous: “Mr. Kennedy believes the polio vaccine ought to be accessible to the general public and completely and correctly studied.” Not fairly a full-throated endorsement.) He has additionally sown doubt about vaccines at a time when vaccine hesitancy is fueling a historic and horrifying measles outbreak within the Southwest, which has now contaminated greater than 600 individuals within the U.S. and killed two unvaccinated kids in Texas—the primary measles deaths in America in a decade. An grownup who died in New Mexico was additionally discovered to be contaminated with measles. (Outdoors the U.S., the well being secretary of Chihuahua, Mexico, introduced that an unvaccinated man had died of measles in reference to the Texas outbreak.)
Kennedy has spoken about the advantages of the MMR vaccine but additionally continues to undermine its security and efficacy. He has repeatedly emphasised parental selection in vaccination and, as The Atlantic reported, instructed the grieving father of 1 Texas youngster, “You don’t know what’s within the vaccine anymore.” He insists on selling unproven various remedies comparable to cod-liver oil (a supply of vitamin A), antibiotics, and steroids; in a Fox Information interview, he claimed that these can result in “an nearly miraculous and instantaneous restoration.” In line with precise virologists, it is a prodigious exaggeration of vitamin A’s efficacy, and within the case of the opposite supposed miracle cures, it’s pure invention.
A cootie shot is likely to be an much more fanciful therapy, however, not like with vitamin A, overdoing it gained’t result in liver harm, which Texas pediatricians instructed The New York Instances they’re now seeing in unvaccinated younger sufferers, whose mother and father have been presumably paying Kennedy heed. When so many adults appear intent on returning to the Darkish Ages, we should cherish medical knowledge wherever we discover it. In 2025, the cootie shot stands as an inadvertent rebuke to the nation’s high well being official, in that it emphasizes vaccines’ very actual efficacy in opposition to illness. I’m wondering if the HHS secretary has ever heard this anecdote from his family historical past. On February 25, 1923, his grandmother Rose Kennedy recorded the next in her journal: “Joe Jr. and Jack have a brand new track in regards to the Bedbugs and the Cooties. Additionally a membership the place they provoke new members by sticking pins into them.” Did RFK Jr.’s uncles (who had probably acquired smallpox vaccinations) invent cootie photographs? A subject for additional analysis.
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