Dr. Stanley Plotkini

Stanley Plotkin, dubbed the "Godfather of Vaccines," has worked on vaccines for anthrax, polio, rabies and rotavirus. In the 1960s, at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Plotkin invented the rubella vaccine, which is credited with eradicating the disease in the United States. Plotkin, a pediatrician and vaccinologist, is consulting for pharmaceutical companies on vaccine development to halt the COVID-19 pandemic. Rubella, also known as German measles, resulted in mild illness for the adults that contracted it but caused major birth defects for fetuses in utero. The '60s saw "a rubella pandemic swept across the United States and Europe and left some 12,000 infants deaf, blind, or with both impairments," according to Wistar Institute. Plotkin's vaccine is the "R" in the MMR vaccine that children get worldwide. CNBC interviewed Plotkin at his home outside of Philadelphia. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How does the COVID-19 pandemic compare to the rubella pandemic? Rubella infected all kinds of people, but the danger was mainly to pregnant women. We have the current coronavirus, and it can kill people, so everybody is at risk. Going back to rubella, there was a lot of panic among women, and I was able to calculate that 1% of all of the pregnancies in Philadelphia during the epidemic were affected by rubella. So women were very upset. Today, of course, everyone is upset because coronavirus can infect anyone and is particularly lethal for the elderly. Is today's effort appropriate? I think so. The question is whether one can stop the spread of the virus the way it has been successful in China. Our societies are not like Chinese society, and so it remains to be seen.

Obviously, the social disruption, the economic disruption, is considerably greater than it was with rubella, so how long can we continue? I'm not the person to judge that, but I think it's appropriate what we're doing today to stop the spread of the coronavirus and therefore to ultimately decrease the number of infected people. If we don't [socially isolate], then probably 70% to 80% of us will get infected. Everyone is talking about "flattening the curve." What does that mean? The point is to decrease the number of people who get infected, because obviously it's the infected people who transmit [the disease] to other people. If you decrease the number of people carrying the virus, you decrease the propagation of the [pandemic], and that's what the [social] isolation is attempting to do. The question is, will there be a reservoir of virus which will cause the virus to return? The results in China suggest that at least, at the moment, you can stop the spread of the virus. Whether that will happen here or not remains to be seen.

What do you think of the US government's response to rubella vs. the coronavirus? Although there was a lot of anguish in the '60s and research was launched by grants through the government, [the response to rubella] was not nearly the same kind of response as with the coronavirus. It wasn't the same panic. There wasn't the same investment of money. There wasn't isolation. This is a much bigger response than [with] rubella. We're in a big rush to develop vaccines against this coronavirus. In the '60s there were multiple efforts to develop vaccines, including my own, but it wasn't the same all-hands-on-board as it is now. How do you develop a vaccine? I had worked a lot on the oral polio vaccine, and so I had learned how to weaken a virus. When I launched the project to develop a rubella vaccine, essentially it was to weaken the virus to make it into something that immunizes people but [doesn't] cause the congenital malformations that the natural virus causes.

This is a much bigger response than [with] rubella. We're in a big rush to develop vaccines against this coronavirus. In the '60s there were multiple efforts to develop vaccines, including my own, but it wasn't the same all-hands-on-board as it is now.