Paul Parkman, an inventor of the rubella vaccine, dies at 91

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Paul D. Parkman, a scientist who in the 1960s played a central role in identifying the rubella virus and developing a vaccine to combat it, breakthroughs that have eliminated from much of the world a disease that can cause catastrophic birth defects and fetal death, died May 7 at his home in Auburn, N.Y. He was 91.

He had cancer, said his niece Theresa Leonardi.

Dr. Parkman trained as a pediatrician but was drawn into virology while serving in the Army Medical Corps in the early 1960s. Stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he grew bored with an assigned study on adenoviruses, run-of-the-mill germs that in most cases cause mild cold- and flu-like symptoms.

"A runny nose isn't too much to look at," Dr. Parkman recalled years later in an oral history, so he began passing his spare time in a ward that housed recruits suffering from rashes. Many of the young men, Dr. Parkman and his colleagues discovered, had rubella, also known as German measles.

For years, rubella was regarded as a harmless childhood disease, although it could also affect adults. Symptoms, which might include fever, sore throat and runny nose, were generally minor and sometimes went undetected. The most obvious symptom was the red rash that gave the virus its name ("rubella," derived from Latin, means "little red").

In the 1940s, however, an Australian ophthalmologist, Norman McAlister Gregg, observed that a striking number of women who had been infected with rubella early in their pregnancies gave birth to babies with cataracts and heart defects. Maternal rubella was quickly linked also to congenital deafness and intellectual disability, as well as miscarriage and stillbirth.

Two decades passed before the rubella virus was identified in the early 1960s. The discovery is credited jointly to Dr. Parkman and his Army colleagues and to a team of researchers at Harvard University led by Thomas H. Weller, who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his work on the polio virus.

At the time, Dr. Parkman was stationed at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, located outside Washington in suburban Maryland. He moved in 1963 to a civilian position at the nearby National Institutes of Health. There, he and colleagues including Harry M. Meyer Jr. began working on a rubella vaccine just as a massive outbreak began in the United States.

In 1964 and 1965, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 12.5 million Americans contracted rubella, 11,000 pregnancies ended in miscarriage, 2,100 newborns died, and 20,000 babies were born with the birth defects encapsulated by the term "congenital rubella syndrome."

Fearing the consequences for their babies, many women who contracted rubella during pregnancy sought therapeutic abortions. Physicians could not reliably predict if a fetus would be profoundly or only mildly affected by an infection, resulting in what Dr. Parkman described as a "wrenching decision for a mother to have to make."

Rubella epidemics generally occurred in cycles — roughly one every six to nine years — and the one that hit the United States in the mid-1960s was the worst in three decades. Because of work by Dr. Parkman and others, it was to be, for Americans, the last.

In 1966, Dr. Parkman and Meyer announced their discovery of a safe and effective vaccine against rubella. With additional contributions from scientists including Maurice R. Hilleman, the first vaccine was licensed in 1969. Dr. Parkman was also among the scientists who held a patent for a rubella immunity test.

Other rubella vaccines followed and, in the span of four years, were administered to nearly 40 million American children. In 1971, a combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine was introduced to protect recipients against three diseases at once.

Rubella was declared eliminated from the United States in 2004 and from the Americas in 2015. It has been nearly eliminated from Europe. There were 17,865 cases of rubella in 78 countries in 2022, according to the latest data available from the World Health Organization, with congenital rubella syndrome rates highest in Africa and Southeast Asia. But scientists today regard the eradication of rubella as feasible.

"Few men can number themselves among those who directly and measurably advance human welfare, save precious lives and bring new hope to the world," President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote to Dr. Parkman in 1966. "Through your accomplishments in developing an effective experimental vaccine against German measles, you and Dr. Harry Meyer have joined that tiny legion."

Paul Douglas Parkman was born in Auburn, in Upstate New York, on May 29, 1932. He grew up in the nearby town of Weedsport, where his father was a clerk for the post office and local school board and raised poultry on the side. His mother was a homemaker.

Dr. Parkman was salutatorian of his high school class. Elmerina Leonardi, a classmate since kindergarten, was valedictorian. They were married in 1955.

By that time, Dr. Parkman was enrolled in a dual program at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., where he majored in biology, and what is now Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, part of the State University of New York, where he received a medical degree in 1957, first in his class.

During a residency in pediatrics, he often gave newborns their first medical examinations. He recalled his sorrow as he once wheeled a bassinet bearing a stillborn baby into the mother's room so that she could gaze upon her child. The baby had a rash — the likely result, Dr. Parkman realized later, of a rubella infection during the mother's pregnancy.

During his time at NIH, Dr. Parkman became chief of the section on general virology before his department was transferred to the Food and Drug Administration. He rose to lead the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, where he helped oversee policies on HIV/AIDS testing and treatment, before his retirement in 1990.

Dr. Parkman was a longtime resident of Kensington, Md. He and his wife were avid collectors of works from the American studio glass movement and donated portions of their collection to the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His wife, of Auburn, is his only immediate survivor.

Dr. Parkman reflected with anguish on the resistance to standard vaccination that has taken hold in recent years in some circles, particularly among parents of young children, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh any risks they may have, and that vaccination is among the most powerful tools for preserving individual and collective health.

"As I look back on my career, I have come to think that perhaps I was involved in the easy part," he wrote in the publication FDA Consumer in 2002. "It will be for others to take on the difficult task of maintaining the protections that we struggled to achieve. We must prevent the spread of this vaccine nihilism, for if it were to prevail, our successes could be lost."