If anyone in the country should be expected to sing the praises of the measles vaccine, it would be David Edmonston, 82, a retired home contractor in Bowling Green, Virginia.
The vaccine literally is named for him.
The other day, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the medical arsonist who has called the measles vaccine “largely unnecessary” and risky — announced that “the decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” I spoke with Edmonston about his unlikely journey from playing a vital role in the vaccine’s birth 70-some years ago to deciding not to vaccinate his own son and now back to firm support for the shot.
It’s a dizzying tale that could shed light on why so many Americans have now decided to spurn vaccines that save lives and prevent misery.
It was the fall of 1953 and young David’s parents, concerned that he needed a more disciplined environment, sent their 10-year-old from his home in Bethesda to a boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts. Within a few months, he contracted measles, one of the most contagious diseases on the planet and back then a killer of hundreds of American children each year.
As he recovered in isolation in the Fay School’s infirmary, David received a visit from Thomas Peebles, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Boston, 25 miles away. When Peebles and his colleague John Enders, in a hurry to develop a measles vaccine, learned of the outbreak at Fay, Peebles visited David and asked if he’d like to help the world.
David recalls giving blood samples and having his throat swabbed, as well as gargling something that tasted of sour milk. A few weeks later, Peebles returned to let David know that the samples had produced exactly what the scientists needed: the measles virus, which they planned to isolate and develop into a vaccine.
The doctor offered David a steak dinner for his troubles, but he declined: “I wasn’t too keen on steak, so I said, ‘No, thanks,’” he recalled.
It took several years for the scientists to turn David’s virus sample into a vaccine and years to test its efficacy and safety, but when it finally was licensed in 1963, it was named for the boy whose illness made the advance possible: The Edmonston-B strain led to the Edmonston-Enders vaccine, a version of which is still used today.
CBS flew David from Washington to New York to appear on TV with the scientists to celebrate the vaccine, part of an extensive public health campaign that persuaded an overwhelming majority of parents to immunize their children — leading to the elimination of measles from the country in 2000.