A Titan of Vaccine Development Sees His Field's Achievements Slip Away : Shared by Tom McDermott

As childhood vaccination rates decline across the industrialized world — falling to their lowest levels in a decade in both the United States and much of Europe — Stanley Plotkin, the 93-year-old scientist whose work helped eliminate rubella and rotavirus as major childhood killers, warns that outbreaks of preventable diseases are now inevitable. Tom

A Titan of Vaccine Development Sees His Field's Achievements Slip Away

Helen Branswell 

STAT News March 2, 2026 

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Summary

Stanley Plotkin, 93, known as the "godfather of vaccines" and a co-developer of the rubella and rotavirus vaccines, says he is watching the achievements of his career be dismantled. Plotkin trained at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and later headed vaccine development at Pasteur-Mérieux in Paris before returning to the United States. The field's standard reference textbook, now in its eighth edition, bears his name. 

In two recent interviews, Plotkin expressed alarm at eroding vaccination rates in the United States, attributing the decline to the absence of living memory of vaccine-preventable diseases, the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media, and the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation's top health official. 

He warned that the United States, already experiencing measles outbreaks, could see a return of rubella, since the two vaccines are administered together and rubella vaccination rates are falling in parallel. He predicted that outbreaks of preventable diseases are the only development likely to reverse current trends, but expressed little optimism that change would come soon. 

Quote

 "All I can say is that I'm beginning to regret having lived so long — because we're going downhill." "To tell people that they don't need to be vaccinated is simply promoting disease. Not only is it stupid, but it's immoral."