In fall 1962, a new measles vaccine was imminent, and producers at CBS wanted the story. The producers reached out to the Office of the Surgeon General, whose information specialists were eager to help; after all, the US Public Health Service wanted publicity for the vaccine. The specialists worked with CBS’s reporter for weeks, giving him access to “all sources of information.”1 The resulting broadcast, “The Taming of a Virus,” dramatized the development of 2 new measles vaccines and detailed the disease’s toll in West Africa, where it killed 1 in 5 children younger than age 6.2
In the United States, measles was far less deadly, with a mortality rate of 1 in 500 000 in 1960.3 The television program’s focus on West Africa, then, was strategic. It portrayed the United States as a global superpower exercising its beneficence through biomedicine, and it vividly illustrated something the US Public Health Service was eager to tell the public: that measles was a “major health hazard” that could be “crippling,” if not fatal.2 For in the 1960s, measles was not uniformly regarded as serious in the United States. Measles was “often welcomed as a guarantee of lifetime immunity,” as the Surgeon General’s information specialists put it; people saw it as “trivial” and “basically a disease of childhood.”2 All these views complicated the US Public Health Service’s job, which was not just to inform the public about the vaccine but to change public opinion about the disease.
This public relations challenge—the need to change the public’s mind about the disease target of a new vaccine—has been met and overcome time and again in the modern era of vaccination, which was heralded in the 1960s with the licensure of the first 2 measles vaccines. This new era was distinct from the preceding era of vaccination for 4 main reasons. First, federal leadership in support of immunization at the local level grew. Second, immunization proponents championed the required vaccination of children as the best means of ensuring a protected population. Third, such proponents championed the idea that mass vaccination would not just help manage infectious diseases but also eradicate them. And fourth, the focus of local and federally supported immunization initiatives began to extend to the “mild” and “moderate” diseases of childhood, such as measles, so-called by medical and public health professionals because they were seen as less severe than previous targets of mass vaccination, such as smallpox, polio, and diphtheria.4 Measles was the first such disease to become the target of a federally supported eradication-through-vaccination campaign, one that relied heavily on the preemptive, required vaccination of children. Its story thus epitomizes the range of political, epidemiological, cultural, and communications challenges to mass immunization in the modern era of vaccination.
