A titan of vaccine development sees his field’s achievements slip away

STAT News · Mar 2, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Stanley Plotkin, the ‘godfather of vaccines,’ knows what comes next Helen Branswell covers issues broadly related to infectious diseases, including outbreaks, preparedness, research, and vaccine development. Follow her on Mastodon and Bluesky. You can reach Helen on Signal at hbranswell.01. Stanley Plotkin recalls a night in 1957, during his pediatrics internship, when a father brought a gravely ill toddler into the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital on his shift. The 3-year-old was struggling to breathe. Before Plotkin could even examine the little boy, he died. The child had contracted Haemophilus influenzae type b, a nasty bacterial illness that can cause mild symptoms in some children, but triggers dangerous, more systemic disease in others — things like meningitis, pneumonia, and sepsis. In the case of the boy Plotkin saw, it induced swelling of the epiglottis, the flap at the base of the tongue that prevents food from entering the airways. When the epiglottis swells, a kid can’t breathe. “That was a terrible disease which caused a lot of mortality and hospitalizations, and which disappeared after the vaccination,” said Plotkin. Plotkin, now 93, has seen similar stories play out time and again over his lifetime. Deadly childhood disease after deadly childhood disease quelled by vaccines. It just so happens that he had a hand in developing a number of them, including the vaccines that protect against rubella and rotavirus. Plotkin is sometimes called the “godfather of vaccines.” His contributions to vaccinology are so substantial, they literally named the field’s go-to textbook after him. “Plotkin’s Vaccines” is now in its eighth edition; a ninth is in production. But the world is changing, and public health gains are being lost. In a pair of recent interviews with STAT, Plotkin expressed dismay at seeing the achievements of his career and his field slip away. He knows what lies ahead: Lots of kids will contract illnesses that could be prevented, and some of them will die. “All I can say is that I’m beginning to regret having lived so long — because we’re going downhill,” Plotkin said. Walter Straus, a vaccine industry executive and a neighbor of Plotkin and his wife, Susan, in southeastern Pennsylvania, described the man he’s long admired as someone who is highly rational and who typically believes reason will prevail. “And I think that’s one reason why Stanley is so discouraged right now. Because he’s seeing his life’s work dismantled, in some cases, repudiated, on specious grounds,” Straus said in an interview. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested Plotkin is in the pantheon of vaccinologists. “He is one of a handful of people who were very heavily involved, at the individual scientific level, in developing vaccines. I mean, if you look at the cohort back then, there’s Stanley Plotkin, there’s Maurice Hilleman, there’s Hilary Koprowski,” Fauci said. (Hilleman was involved in the development of multiple vaccines and died in 2005; Koprowski developed a rabies vaccine, among others, and died in 2013.) “He was there when it was bad and he helped to make it good,” he said. Plotkin remembers the bad times, before most vaccines were developed and put into broad use. He knows the pathogens that have been largely controlled by these vaccines aren’t gone from the globe and will again sicken American children in ever increasing numbers if vaccination levels continue to fall. Take Haemophilus influenzae type b, the disease Plotkin saw in the 3-year-old who died in Cleveland nearly 70 years ago. Before vaccines were introduced in the latter half of the 1980s, about 20,000 children a year in the U.S. developed the more serious forms of Hib, where the infection moves into other organ systems. (Mild cases typically manifest as ear infections or infections of the airways.) Somewhere between 3% to 6% of those children didn’t survive. A number of the survivors carried scars of the infection for the rest of their lives — deafness, blindness, and developmental delays among them. Widespread use of Hib vaccine has brought cases of invasive disease in this country down to levels so low that single cases are actually newsworthy. (This study, published last March, reports on the only two cases a New York City hospital saw over a 10-year period.) But the health gains achieved through vaccination over the past seven decades are in peril. Vaccination rates have been eroding, a trend that has picked up steam in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leader of the anti-vaccine movement, to the nation’s top health position. Kennedy and some of the people he’s placed in key roles across HHS and its agencies have made sweeping alterations to vaccination policy, undermining vaccine confidence in the process. Plotkin knew what would happen if Kennedy became health secretary. “Oh, I expected it,” he said of the myriad changes that Kennedy has overseen. “I did everything I could when Kennedy was up for confirmation, to convince people like Senator [Bill] Cassidy to vote against him — and failed.” Beyond Covid and Kennedy, he attributes the declining confidence in vaccines to memory — more precisely, the fact that today’s younger generations have no recall of what used to be — as well as the dissemination of anti-vaccine propaganda on social media and the shortcomings of science education in schools. “So, people can be reading lies and not recognizing it. I don’t know how to deal with that,” he said. Circumstances were different when he was young, growing up in the Bronx in New York. His parents, a commercial telegrapher and a stay-at-home mother who was active in local politics, along with their contemporaries, were afraid of diseases, not the vaccines developed to prevent them, Plotkin said; they knew too well that previously healthy children could die, prayed-for pregnancies could be lost, children could be left permanently altered by chance encounters with viruses or bacteria. Today’s parents grew up in a world where vaccines averted preventable diseases, or at least lessened the toll of those illnesses if infection occurred. They have no memory of the worst of these conditions, and in some cases their parents don’t either. Because vaccine development advanced so rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, most people under the age of 60 never feared polio, didn’t suffer the discomfort of measles, and never watched their mother lose a pregnancy to congenital rubella. “My parents … would have never been influenced by the things being said today because they witnessed disease in children — and myself for that matter. And therefore they would be anxious to have some way of preventing those diseases, which were certainly rife when I was a kid, but that, because of vaccines, have disappeared, largely,” Plotkin said. “In the absence of disease, people are less worried,” he said. “And they ask themselves: Why should I vaccinate the child because there’s no disease around?” A decline in trust in experts has exacerbated the problem, as has the rise of social media and the acceptance of advice from “experts” who are not expert. He is not hopeful things will turn around in the near term. “The only thing that might change things would be outbreaks of diseases that could have been preventable,” he said. “But it will take a while, and so I am not optimistic that things will change in any favorable direction in the foreseeable future.” An opportunity arises When Plotkin was starting his career, there was not skepticism about vaccines but enthusiasm. Inspired by the novel “Arrowsmith,” by Sinclair Lewis, and the popular science book “Microbe Hunters,” by Paul de Kruif, Plotkin decided in his mid-teens that he wanted to be a researcher, and to work on vaccines. In the late 1950s, having graduated from medical school and joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s famed Epidemic Intelligence Service program, he learned that Koprowski had recently been named director of the Philadelphia-based Wistar Institute, a nonprofit research organization that was becoming famous for its work on vaccines. Plotkin took an EIS fieldwork assignment to Philadelphia to investigate anthrax, not because he was interested in anthrax, but because he hoped to engineer a meeting with Koprowski. “I reasoned that if I went there, I could get into his lab. Which I did,” he said. “And that enabled me to start working on polio [vaccine].” Jonas Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine, which was given by injection, was already in use at that point. But Albert Sabin and Koprowski were both — separately — trying to develop oral polio vaccines using live attenuated or weakened viruses. Koprowski’s lab, with Plotkin in it, was the first to manage to attenuate polio viruses for use in a vaccine. Sabin’s effort, however, produced a candidate vaccine with viruses that were even further attenuated and safer to use than Koprowski’s, and the Wistar version fell by the wayside. Plotkin with his wife in Paris, where he lived for 7 years.Courtesy Stanley Plotkin Plotkin later turned his attention to development of a rubella vaccine, hoping to find a way to prevent a disease that caused significant suffering. Though an unpleasant illness for children, rubella — then often called German measles — posed a greater risk for fetuses. Women infected during pregnancy, especially in the first trimester, are more likely to miscarry or have a stillbirth. Babies infected in the womb can suffer a range of irreversible side effects, including deafness, heart defects, and cognitive disabilities. During the last major rubella outbreak in the U.S. in 1964-1965, 11,000 women lost their pregnancies because of the infection and an estimated 20,000 babies were born with congenital rubella syndrome. While working on the vaccine, Plotkin was also caring for infected babies and pregnant women. “That was a very soberi