The most sickening part of the measles outbreak that has struck more than 200 people in 12 states this year is how absurdly unnecessary it is. Inevitable, too, in a country where, as recently as 2001, 94 percent of Americans believed it was very or extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated, but now, according to Gallup, only 69 percent say so.
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.
After college and a stint in the Deep South protesting with civil rights advocates, Edmonston settled into a life remodeling homes. He’d never had much interest in science, but he married a public health teacher, and when they had a son in 1980, they decided not to vaccinate him.
“My wife read an article that a researcher wrote, saying that the measles vaccine might give children a disease,” Edmonston said. “It was scary. My wife thought it was better not to vaccinate him. And I agreed to it: She was the mother and had some public health training. He never did get vaccinated.”
Edmonston’s wife died two decades ago. He has lived for many years in a spiritual community based on Indian meditation, many of whose adherents, he says, are vaccination skeptics. Especially once the coronavirus pandemic hit, he saw his friends “latch on to the idea that vaccines are dangerous,” he said, “and they became almost religious about it. I’ve struggled for years to understand why.”
As people around him turned against vaccines, he read some of the science and pivoted the other way.
“The more I thought about it, the more I returned to my feeling for the degree of intellectual honesty of the doctors I met all those years ago — their basic integrity,” he said.
His vaccine-hesitant friends “are more willing to think in intuitive ways, rather than rational thinking,” Edmonston said. “I’ve lived in both those worlds. I’m by nature a more rational person, but I’ve become more intuitive in my work with this spiritual group. I still struggle with how to persuade people who are more intuitive.”
A marshaling of facts doesn’t do the trick. Statistics showing that the measles vaccine has saved 60 million lives in this century alone don’t convince the resistant.
And it doesn’t help to have authority figures such as Kennedy and Donald Trump, who spread doubt about vaccines even as they sometimes claim to support them.
After Edmonston got the covid shots, he emailed his friends, urging them to protect their communities (to little effect). He lobbied his son, too. No go.
He’s left with some guilt about not vaccinating his son years ago (“It’s one of the little things I worry a bit about”) and a realization that, for the hesitant, emotions matter more than facts.