Vaccine News & Notes — December 2022

Resource reminder! Talking to family members with differing opinions

The holidays are a time for catching up with family and friends. Unfortunately, over the past few years, some of these meetings have been filled with tension as opinions differ about the pandemic, politics and vaccines. The VEC offers a Q&A sheet, “Families and Vaccines: When Opinions Differ,” with tips for making vaccine conversations more comfortable.

Remembering a measles vaccine scientist

Recently, Dr. Samuel Katz, a renowned pediatrician and virologist, passed away. Dr. Katz helped to create and test the original weakened measles virus that served as the basis for the current measles vaccine. Dr. Katz, along with his lab colleagues and their mentor, Dr. John Enders, figured out how to grow measles virus in the lab, created early versions of the vaccine virus, and tested it in children. The virus they tested protected children but caused high rates of side effects, like fever and rash. It was later further attenuated, or weakened, by Dr. Maurice Hilleman at Merck. Renamed the “Moraten” strain to represent the fact that it was a more attenuated version of the Enders strain, the strain continues to protect children against measles as part of the MMR vaccine, recommended for all U.S. children at 12 months and 4 years of age.

Find out more:

• Read Dr. Katz’s obituary, posted on the Duke School of Medicine website.
• See Dr. Katz’s “VaxPackHero” card.
• Watch an animation about viral attenuation.
• Read more about the history of the measles vaccine in Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases by Dr. Paul Offit, VEC Director.
• Watch the award-winning documentary, Hilleman: A Perilous Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases.