On Nov. 13, 1956, a scientific team led by John Enders at Harvard, known as “the Father of Modern Vaccines”,  Thomas Peeble, Kevin McCarthy, Milan Milovanovic, Anna Mitus, and Ann Holloway presented a paper on the ‘measles virus isolation, properties and behavior’ to the American public Health Association.

In 1954, Enders and Peebles collected blood samples from several ill students during a measles outbreak in Boston, Massachusetts. They wanted to isolate the measles virus in the student’s blood and create a measles vaccine. They succeeded in isolating measles in 13-year-old David Edmonston’s blood.

In 1963, Enders and colleagues transformed their Edmonston-B strain of measles virus into a vaccine and licensed it in the United States. In 1968, an improved and even weaker measles vaccine, developed by Maurice Hilleman and colleagues, began to be distributed. This vaccine, called the Edmonston-Enders (formerly “Moraten”) strain has been the only measles vaccine used in the United States since 1968.