Dr. John Robbins: One of the developers of meningitis vaccine

Dr. John B. Robbins, a pioneer in vaccinology and one of the inventors of the first effective defense against a form of meningitis that once killed more than a thousand infants a day worldwide, died Nov. 27 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

The cause was prostate cancer, his son Robert said.

By some estimates, Robbins’ vaccine against the illness, called Hib meningitis, has saved 7 million lives since it was licensed in 1989.

Pediatricians who worked in the pre-vaccine days remember feeling their hearts sink when they saw Hib bacteria under a microscope in a baby’s spinal fluid. It meant that, even with antibiotics, the child was at risk of permanent brain damage, deafness or death.

Before the vaccine, Hib meningitis killed about 400,000 children a year, according to the World Health Organization.

Since then, the disease largely has been relegated to the medical history books. The vaccine is now given in more than 180 countries; in the United States, there is now only about one case of Hib meningitis a year for every million children under age 5, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The chief discovery made by Robbins and his longtime collaborator, Dr. Rachel Schneerson, also now is used to strengthen vaccines against typhoid fever, whooping cough, lethal E. coli bacteria, Clostridium difficile and anthrax.

That discovery, known as conjugation, involves attaching proteins to the polysaccharides — complex sugars — on the bacterium’s outer capsule. Conjugated pairs of proteins and sugars are much more visible to infants’ immature immune systems and help them generate protective antibodies.

Two weeks before Robbins died, the first large rollout of a conjugate typhoid fever vaccine he also helped invent began, with 10 million children in Pakistan inoculated, according to Dr. Anita Zaidi, an expert on intestinal diseases at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funded research on that vaccine.

Robbins and Schneerson also conceived of an unusual vaccine for stopping malaria outbreaks: Instead of attacking malaria parasites in a person’s blood, the vaccine would be picked up from recipients by mosquitoes who bit them. The vaccine would then attack the parasites in the mosquitoes’ midguts, making them unable to infect anyone else.

Unlike some vaccine researchers, Robbins and Schneerson never got rich from their inventions.

“We had a notion — a wrong notion, maybe — that public money went into making it, so it should be free to the public,” Schneerson said in a telephone interview. “Why wrong? Because immediately someone else did a little modification and applied for a patent.”

Also, she added, in the days when they did their breakthrough research, “the NIH had only one single lawyer, who was not interested in vaccines. Now there’s lots of lawyers who say every day, ‘What can we patent?’ ”

Robbins conducted research on the Bethesda, Maryland, campus of the National Institutes of Health from 1970 until his retirement at age 80 in 2012, either for the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development or in the Food and Drug Administration’s biologics laboratories there.

He won many awards jointly with Schneerson, including the 1996 Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award, the 2006 Pasteur Award from the World Health Organization and Thailand’s 2017 Prince Mahidol Foundation Award for Public Health. (Some also were shared with Porter W. Anderson and Dr. David H. Smith, who developed the polysaccharide components of the Hib vaccine.)

Until the 1980s, vaccines against bacterial diseases were often made from whole bacteria or their toxins that had to be killed or weakened.

They could be dangerous: Some occasionally induced high fevers that could trigger convulsions. Worse, if a manufacturing failure left any full-strength bacteria alive, children could die.

The next generation of vaccines, made of just the surface polysaccharides, were safer. But they rarely worked in children under age 2, who were the most at risk. Robbins’ conjugate Hib vaccine protected babies as young as 2 months old.

Hib stands for Haemophilus influenzae type b. Hib bacteria got their name because they were first isolated during the 1889 flu pandemic and, until 1933, were believed to be the cause of influenza. Flu is actually a virus; Hib is a common secondary infection that may be lethal if it reaches the bloodstream or brain.

John Bennet Robbins was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 1, 1932, to Harry Robbins and Matilda (Bender) Robbins, owners of the Cornell Paper and Box Co. in the borough’s Red Hook section.

His paternal grandfather, Philip Rabinowitz, who immigrated to America, was the last of a line of prominent rabbis from Minsk, in what is now Belarus. However, Robert Robbins said, he lost his American rabbinical post for publicly advocating unions, which some members of his congregation opposed.

“My grandfather was one of eight children of an outof-work rabbi, so he dropped out of school to work,” Robbins said. He took a job in the Brooklyn dockyards.

Harry changed his surname to Robbins, Schneerson said, because at 16 he was beaten up by co-workers after winning a promotion.

“It’s OK to be Jewish, but you don’t have to die for it,” she said Robbins quoted his father as saying.

In 1956, he married Joan Cannon, who survives him. Besides his son Robert, he also is survived by two other sons, Daniel and David; a daughter, Ellen Taxman; a brother, Marc; nine grandchildren; and two greatgrandchildren.

Taxman said he was such an advocate of vaccines that he made sure his children received every new one to be invented. “I felt like a human pincushion,” she said.

During the 1976 swine flu scare, she remembered, when an experimental new vaccine was scarce, he brought vials of it to the annual staff holiday party he gave at his house.

Every attendee was offered an injection and a Tshirt with a picture of Porky Pig saying “I got my shot!” on it.

“That was his idea of a holiday gift,” she said.