Early vaccine developer has a passion for saving lives | Mark Ryan

Pretend, for a moment, that Stanley Plotkin had been the news anchor reporting on COVID-19 developments at your favorite television station the past two years.

What he lacked in showmanship, he would have made up for in science credibility.

Plotkin, active at age 91, is credited with developing in 1964 the vaccine for rubella (German measles) – which infected 12.5 million people including an estimated 20,000 babies born in the United States with birth defects such as blindness, deafness, heart defects, and intellectual disabilities.

There is no telling how many lives Plotkin and his vaccine saved.

Like COVID-19, rubella is a contagious disease that can be transmitted via breathing in droplets in the air.

Like his COVID-19 scientist colleagues, Plotkin is keenly aware of ill-informed vaccine skeptics.

In August of 2021, when it was his turn to speak at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory committee meeting, Plotkin had harsh criticism for some of the skeptics. He began a public statement, as follows, after listening to several anti-vaccine comments: “After hearing some of the prior comments, I would move to remind you that there is no vaccine against stupidity.”

Plotkin’s colleagues are now recommending an updated COVID-19 vaccine for the fall that would target the currently circulating Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5. (Plotkin disagrees with the characterization of the updated vaccine as a “booster” because, he says, the word insinuates failure by the previous shots.)

If pattern holds true to form, thousands of Americans will choose not to take the updated COVID-19 vaccine in the fall – many of the same thousands who received the measles-mumps-rubella (a.k.a. “MMR”) combination vaccine when they were school age.

Most disturbing is that today’s questioning of vaccines’ safety and value has shifted away from COVID-19 to vaccines that have been afterthoughts to most Americans. There are now proposals – and signed laws – that oppose all vaccines.

The experts are fearful the so-called anti-vaxxers could begin to reverse a century of progress made against diseases.

“If you (challenge) all of the childhood vaccinations that are required, we could be in a really serious situation with outbreaks of diseases that long ago should have been eliminated in our society. We just can’t have that,” said Anthony Fauci in an interview at the 2021 STAT Summit.

Plotkin, when answering a question during an interview at the 4th Conference on Vaccines in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in September of 2017, hinted at the mainstream media being partially responsible for some of the misinformation.

“What the press does, and I can understand this, they always feel that they have to present both sides of the story and give them equal value,” he said. “It means, no matter how crazy you are, you can get a hearing.”

So in order to be balanced, Plotkin the news anchor would be asked to give equal time to the crazy science opinions.

No, that would not work for Plotkin.

Mark Ryan is a Tallahassee RN.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Skeptics alarm Stanley Plotkin, developer of the measles vaccine