Samuel Katz, longtime Duke researcher who helped create measles vaccine, dies at 95

Dr. Samuel Katz was a third-year medical resident at a Boston children’s hospital in 1955 when an amazing thing happened. The overflowing polio ward he worked in emptied and its iron lungs went silent as the new polio vaccine began eradicating the disease.

He knew then that he wanted to study infectious diseases and perhaps contribute to the next world-changing vaccine. He succeeded. Katz, a longtime Duke professor, played a major role in creating the measles vaccine, which has saved millions of lives around the world.

Katz died on Oct. 31 at age 95 after a lengthy illness.

Shortly after his stint in the polio units, Katz sought out a job in the lab of Dr. John Enders, a Nobel laureate whose research laid the groundwork for the polio vaccine.

“My father felt like this was an area where he could do some good — there were so many other diseases that didn’t yet have vaccines,” said Katz’s son, John Katz.

He spent the next 12 years at Harvard University creating a weakened version of the measles virus that could be used in a vaccine and testing it in animals and humans. The lab successfully licensed the vaccine in 1963. It was later combined with mumps and rubella vaccines to create the MMR vaccine, which is still used today.

Until then, millions of Americans were infected with measles a year and between 400 and 500 died. The measles vaccine is estimated to have prevented more than 30 million deaths globally in the last 20 years.

Katz left Harvard for Duke in 1968, where he worked extensively on a range of other vaccines, including rubella, influenza and whooping cough.

Katz served as the chair of the Duke Department of Pediatrics for 22 years until he resigned in 1990 to study pediatric AIDs with his wife, Dr. Catherine Wilfret, who headed the Pediatric Infectious Disease Clinic at Duke.

During his career, he was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal, the Pollin Prize and the Alfred I. duPont Award.

Vaccines under attack

In time, Katz’s work became a victim of its own success: As memories of measles outbreaks faded, vaccine hesitancy grew among young parents.

The movement was set off by a study published in a prestigious medical journal that claimed to have found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The study has been repeatedly proven wrong in subsequent studies and was retracted by the journal in 2010 after it was revealed the author manipulated his data and was paid by a personal injury lawyer who was suing vaccine makers.

Since then, measles cases have cropped up mainly in unvaccinated pockets of the United States. In 2019, more than a thousand cases were reported in 31 states.

“Most young parents cannot appreciate, fortunately, as I do, the horror of polio with iron lungs and crutches; measles with encephalitis,” Katz testified in 1999 to a House committee on government reform.

Katz became a public advocate for the safety and importance of global vaccination, some calling him the “vaccine ambassador.”

“I think he just felt that there was a need for people to speak up,” said John Katz. “The notion that parents would think that the cure was worse than the disease would have been very upsetting to him.”

Katz is survived by six children, John Katz, Deborah Miora, William Katz, Susan Calderon, Penelope Katz Facher and David L. Katz; two stepchildren, Rachel Wilfert and Katie Regen; and 17 grandchildren.

Teddy Rosenbluth covers science and healthcare for The News & Observer in a position funded by Duke Health and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.