The Vaccine Race

by Meredith Wadman

  • • •

  Eva Herrström, who dissected fetal organs for shipping to the Wistar Institute, was the chief technician in Sven Gard’s laboratory at the Karolinska Institute until he retired in 1972. She then worked for Margareta Böttiger at Sweden’s National Bacteriological Laboratory for another twenty years. Today Herrström is ninety-one, lives in Stockholm, and enjoys spending time at a family-owned seaside house in the Stockholm archipelago.

  The monkey house on the grounds of the National Bacteriological Laboratory, where Herrström worked and where the fetal dissections were done, is still standing. In 2013 the second-floor space that once housed Sven Gard’s lab was lined with offices occupied by quality-control employees of Crucell, a Dutch vaccine-making company that is an arm of Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies. Crucell’s flagship technology, which it is using to develop candidate vaccines against the Ebola and Marburg viruses, was developed using retinal cells from a fetus that was electively aborted in the Netherlands in 1985.

  • • •

  Hilary Koprowski in the 1980s made a $15 million personal fortune by launching a company, Centocor, using antibody technology developed—but not patented—by other scientists. Koprowski obtained it for free from one of the inventors, then filed for two far-reaching patents.5

  Koprowski led the Wistar Institute for thirty-four years, until 1991, when the board of managers ousted him in the face of dire financial problems. They were caused by the expiration in the 1980s of the patents on the rubella and rabies vaccines, and the attendant loss of more than $3 million in annual income.6 Koprowski sued for age discrimination; the lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993.7 He moved to Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, where he was director of the Center for Neurovirology. The last of his 822 scientific papers was published in 2013, the year that he died at age ninety-six. It assessed whether bat ticks could transmit rabies and found that they were unlikely vectors.8

  • • •

  Chip and Betsy MacConnell, the parents of Anna MacConnell, who died from the effects of congenital rubella in 2012, established a charity in her memory called Angels for Anna (www.angelsforanna.com). It provides “parent packs” of pajamas and toiletries for parents facing the unexpected admission of a child to the hospital. Their long-term goal is to build a comprehensive pediatric rehabilitation facility in the Dayton area.

  • • •

  Stanley Plotkin, who invented the rubella vaccine that is used in almost every country that vaccinates against the disease, became the director of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and later medical and scientific director for the vaccine maker now called Sanofi Pasteur. At eighty-four he is today an independent consultant for vaccine manufacturers and nonprofits. He has worked for years to develop a vaccine against cytomegalovirus (CMV), today the most common cause of virus-induced injury to fetuses in the United States. Thanks in part to his efforts, the major vaccine makers now have CMV vaccines in development. Plotkin lives with his wife, Susan, outside Philadelphia. He got his pilot’s license at age seventy-four and began piano lessons at age eighty-one.

  The St. Vincent’s Home for Children, where Plotkin conducted the first trials of his rubella vaccine in the mid-1960s, was closed by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in 1981. Today it serves as a truancy court for the School District of Philadelphia. Across the lane the archdiocese’s home and maternity hospital for unwed mothers, where Hayflick’s polio vaccine was tested on newborns in 1962, houses a day-care center, the Early Years Development Center.

  The Hamburg State School and Hospital, which housed some 950 people when Plotkin tested his rubella vaccine there, is still a state-run institution. Today called the Hamburg Center, it houses and provides services for 122 people with intellectual disabilities and physical challenges.

  Philadelphia General Hospital, where both Koprowski’s and Hayflick’s polio vaccines were tested on premature babies, was closed in 1977. Today, the grounds where it stood are occupied by the medical campuses of the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

  Clinton State Farms, the New Jersey women’s prison where both polio vaccines were tested on newborns, is still a state penitentiary. It has been renamed the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, in honor of the warden who ran it for forty years.

  • • •

  Jim Poupard, the school-hating nineteen-year-old who worked for the Wistar in 1962 vaccinating babies with the Hayflick polio vaccine, was lured away to a better-paying job with a drug company after just six months. He went on to earn a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and became the supervisor of clinical microbiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Later he was the head of global strategic microbiology at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. Retired since 2003, he is chairman of the American Society for Microbiology’s Center for the History of Microbiology.

  • • •

  Roderick Murray retired in 1973 and died of a heart attack in 1980. He was seventy years old.

  • • •

  James Schriver died in 1999.

  • • •

  The Ebola vaccine that was tested at the NIH in 2015 proved to be safe in all 140 volunteers. As this book went to press, the investigators were waiting to learn whether it generates effective levels of antibodies. If it does, the trial will continue, with the recruitment of another larger group of volunteers and then another group of hundreds of people at many sites. The process, in the best case, will take years.

  • • •

  Stephen Wenzler, who was born blind and deaf from congenital rubella in Toms River, New Jersey, in 1964, graduated from the Perkins School for the Blind in 1985. He briefly attended Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, but left after being harassed by deaf students; he was one of the few students there who was also blind. He enrolled at Camden County College in New Jersey, where he earned a certificate in computer operations. He excelled with electronics and computers and in the two years before he graduated saved the college an estimated $20,000 on computer repairs. But he ended up in a series of jobs mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms at Roy Rogers, McDonald’s, and Denny’s because his social skills were poor and employers were reluctant to hire him.

  In 2004 the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults featured Wenzler’s photo on a poster that read “Help fight the 1964 rubella epidemic . . . by hiring one of the thousands of Americans it left deaf and blind. Like Stephen Wenzler.”

  In November 2006, on the evening of his forty-second birthday, Wenzler was walking on the shoulder of the road in front of his apartment in suburban New Jersey. A speeding car swerved and hit him. He died instantly.

  Kathy Earp, who worked for the program for the deaf and hard of hearing at Camden County College and knew Wenzler well, spoke at the funeral. “Stephen maintained a sense of humor, patience, and dignity in spite of all life’s challenges that far exceeded that of the average person,” she said. “His life taught me about true courage.”

  • • •

  Mrs. X was living in Sweden in 2013.

  After sending two unanswered letters, I tried to reach her during a research trip to Sweden that year. In a brief conversation with my Swedish research assistant and translator, Mrs. X said that she had no interest in being interviewed. She also said: “They were doing this without my knowledge. That cannot be allowed today.”

  Soon after this conversation, I wrote to Mrs. X, and my assistant translated and printed the letter. I mailed it. In it I assured her that I would never make her name public or contact her again.

  Leonard Hayflick as a young man (right) with his friend Norman Cohen.

  The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology soon after Hilary Koprowski took over in 1957. The building on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia dates to 1894.

  I.S. Ravdin, surgeon-in-chief a
t the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 1959. Ravdin made it possible for Hayflick to obtain aborted fetuses from the hospital.

  Leonard Hayflick examines normal human fetal cells in the lab at The Wistar Institute, circa 1960.

  A microscopic view of young WI-38 cells—fibroblasts from the lungs of a Swedish fetus aborted in 1962. The oblong shapes are cell nuclei. The long, tapered cell bodies are much lighter. The very dark clumps (center near the bottom) are the chromosomes of a cell preparing to divide.

  Old, or “senescent,” WI-38 cells, which have stopped dividing and have lost their slender, compass-needle shapes. Their nuclei are stained with a dye that selectively stains senescent cells.

  Sven Gard with assistants Eva Olsson (left) and Brita Moberg examining baby mice infected with Coxsackie virus in Gard’s Karolinska Institute lab, 1952.

  Eva Herrström, Gard’s chief lab technician, examines tissue cultures infected with polio virus in the Gard lab, 1955.

  Swedish physician and epidemiologist Margareta Böttiger, circa 1962. Böttiger was enlisted to track down the medical history of the Swedish woman whose abortion gave rise to WI-38 cells.

  Swedish gynecologist Eva Ernholm around the time that she performed the WI-38 abortion in 1962. Ernholm loved fast cars and adventure but was cautious when it came to performing abortions.

  Young WI-38 cells were stored for freezing in these ampules on July 31, 1962.

  NIH polio safety scientist Bernice Eddy (left) pictured with her colleague Sarah Stewart, in the 1950s. Eddy was demoted after she discovered—and spoke openly about—a cancer-causing virus in the monkey kidney cells used to make polio vaccine.

  While the issue was ignored by the mainstream press, the National Enquirer reported prominently on the silent, cancer-causing monkey virus that scientists later estimated contaminated tens of millions of doses of the Salk polio vaccine. This cover story appeared on August 20, 1961.

  The nineteen-year-old Jim Poupard gave premature babies at Philadelphia General Hospital experimental polio vaccines made with human fetal lung cells while working for Hilary Koprowski at The Wistar Institute in 1962. He is pictured during his medical technician training in 1961.

  The new Philadelphia General Hospital Premature Infant Nursery in 1956. African American women trusted the hospital and 94 percent of babies born there in 1960 were black. The hospital’s senior pediatrician permitted The Wistar Institute scientists to use the babies for polio vaccine trials.

  Philadelphia General Hospital, circa 1964. The hospital served mainly African Americans. The black wall that separated PGH from the University of Pennsylvania is visible in the foreground.

  Roderick Murray led the National Institutes of Health division that approved vaccines for the U.S. market from 1955 until 1972. For a decade after Hayflick derived the WI-38 cells in 1962, Murray refused to approve vaccines made using them.

  The Pfizer polio vaccine made in Hayflick’s WI-38 cells won FDA approval in 1972, ten years after the cells became available. Supply shortages and a campaign by Lederle Laboratories to sow distrust in the vaccine led Pfizer to withdraw it from the U.S. market in 1976.

  Sir Norman McAlister Gregg, the Australian ophthalmologist who discovered that rubella damages fetuses. Gregg listened deeply to patients, leading to his classic 1941 finding.

  Rubella virus particles in a space between two cells, as seen through an electron microscope. On the left, particles are budding from the surface of a cell. When a cell is invaded, the virus co-opts the cell’s machinery to make many more viruses.

  Stanley Plotkin uses a pipette to transfer rubella virus at The Wistar Institute, circa 1965. Today most pipettes are operated by thumb-controlled pistons, much like syringes.

  Stephen Wenzler as a child, circa 1972. Stephen’s mother, Mary, had rubella early in her pregnancy. Stephen was born blinded by cataracts and profoundly deaf. His heart was also damaged by the virus.

  St. Vincent’s Home for Children in 1971. Stanley Plotkin tested his rubella vaccine on children at the home from 1964 to 1967, with the approval of John Joseph Krol, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia. The Home was owned by the archdiocese and staffed by the Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood.

  Maurice Hilleman (left) with colleague Eugene Buynak, injecting a duck with rubella in the late 1960s. Unlike Plotkin’s human-cell-propagated vaccine, Merck’s first rubella vaccine was made in duck embryo cells.

  A March of Dimes poster in 1970 invoked medical authority and fear to urge people to get vaccinated against rubella with the new vaccines.

  This government-sponsored billboard was part of a campaign to immunize millions with the newly approved rubella vaccines, before an epidemic that was expected as soon as 1970.

  Dorothy Horstmann, a Yale University pediatrician, challenged the effectiveness of the rubella vaccines that were licensed in 1969 and 1970. She finally persuaded Merck’s Maurice Hilleman to switch to Plotkin’s superior vaccine.

  Stanley Plotkin in his office at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, circa 1979. His rubella vaccine, made in WI-38 cells by Merck, was approved by the FDA in 1978.

  Merck’s new rubella vaccine as it entered the U.S. market in January, 1979. The box notes the use of Stanley Plotkin’s RA 27/3 rubella virus strain and its production in the WI-38 cells derived by Leonard Hayflick.

  Leonard Hayflick at Stanford circa 1975, the year that the National Institutes of Health investigated his stewardship of the WI-38 cells.

  James Schriver headed the Division of Management Survey and Review, the NIH’s internal auditing office. Early in 1976, he issued a damning report on Hayflick’s handling and selling of the WI-38 cells.

  Anna MacConnell at eighteen months old in 2002. Scarring of her windpipe after open-heart surgery meant that she had to breathe through a tube until she was three years old. Anna was deaf, blind, and had a four-part heart defect called tetralogy of Fallot. Her mother had rubella while pregnant.

  In 2004, the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults marked the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 rubella epidemic with a poster featuring Stephen Wenzler. It urged employers to hire those whom the epidemic left deaf and blind.

  Bullet-shaped rabies virus particles are shown here magnified about 70,000 times with an electron microscope. Beginning in 1962, Hilary Koprowski and Tadeusz Wiktor used Hayflick’s WI-38 cells to develop a much-improved rabies vaccine.

  Hilary Koprowski being “vaccinated” by Stanley Plotkin (left) during the first human trial of The Wistar Institute’s WI-38-propagated rabies vaccine in 1971. The actual vaccination happened moments earlier. This one was for the camera. The vaccine’s co-inventor, Tadeusz Wiktor, is “restraining” Koprowski.

  Stanley Plotkin at age eighty, in 2012. “I am fond of saying that rubella vaccine has prevented thousands more abortions than have ever been prevented by Catholic religionists,” he says. Today, Plotkin consults for vaccine companies and nonprofits and writes frequent articles urging countries to establish an international fund for vaccine development.

  Leonard Hayflick and his wife, Ruth, at home in the Sea Ranch, California, in 2013. Hayflick kept a liquid nitrogen refrigerator of WI-38 cells in his garage on bluffs above the Pacific until 2006, when he donated the cells to the Coriell Institute for Medical Research. “It was time,” he told Nature, “that my children—now adults—should leave home.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many, many people helped to make this book a reality. I am thankful to every one of them. I have undoubtedly forgotten some people in what follows. I ask their indulgence.

  These pages would never have seen the light of day were it not for New America. Fellowships there funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt and by Bernard Schwartz supported me for two invaluable years of full-time work. I am deeply grateful. The community of writers and scholars at New America was a great source
of inspiration and a healthy complement to the lonely writer’s slog. I would especially like to thank Becky Shafer and Kirsten Berg for their first-rate research assistance and their support of the fellows program; Fuzz Hogan and Andrés Martinez, who, with Becky, believed in this book from the beginning; my fellow fellows, whose enthusiasm and companionship were a boost and a delight; and the following associates and interns who gamely and capably helped with my research: David Allen, Jacob Glenn, Madhu Ramankutty, Courtney Schuster, and Andrew Small.