When the Bug Finally Met Its Match
Welcome to “Remember When Kids Just Died?” A daily two-part tour through every vaccine-preventable disease, starting with polio on September 1, 2026. Each disease gets two posts: the pre-vaccine era, when parents enjoyed the character-building experience of burying their children, and the post-vaccine era, when we ruined everything by making childhood survivable. Cramming both into one post felt disrespectful, to the corpses and the Nobel Prizes.
Last time, we toured the pre-vaccine wonderland where 175,000 American kids a year got whooping cough and thousands died annually. Today’s sequel is more satisfying because the disease loses.
It starts, as most stories about ending mass childhood mortality do, with two unmarried women in a “dumpy broken-down stucco” building in Grand Rapids, Michigan, doing their real job during the day and their world-changing one after dinner (Smithsonian).
Pearl Kendrick, Grace Eldering, and the Vibes-Based Permission to Save Humanity
Pearl Kendrick ran Michigan’s Grand Rapids state health lab, with degrees from Syracuse and Johns Hopkins and, by her niece’s account, “a heavy foot, and people better get out of her way.” She once said, “I never thought there was anything I couldn’t do,” which is the correct energy to bring to a bacterial genocide (Smithsonian).
Grace Eldering grew up on a Montana ranch, taught school, found it boring, and volunteered her way into the lab in 1928, later earning her own Johns Hopkins doctorate. When Kendrick asked her boss for permission to tackle pertussis during the 1932 Michigan outbreak, he gave one of the great lukewarm greenlights in scientific history: “Go ahead and do all you can with pertussis if it amuses you.” He approved zero dollars. So they did it at night, unpaid, walking cold streets to knock on doors. In their words: “We collected specimens by the light of kerosene lamps, from whooping, vomiting, strangling children.”
The Cough Plate, Which Is Exactly What It Sounds Like
Their diagnostic tool was called the “cough plate.” A small, miserable child coughed directly onto an open petri dish held a few inches from their face. The dish got a lid, went into an incubator, and grew Bordetella pertussis colonies Kendrick and Eldering described as “smooth,” “raised,” “glistening,” “pearly,” and “almost transparent,” which sounds like a highlighter palette but is actually the bacterium killing your baby.
Seven weeks after first seeing the pathogen, in January 1933, they produced their first experimental whole-cell vaccine and tested it for safety by injecting it into lab animals and, casually, themselves.
Loney Gordon, Who Actually Found the Right Bug
Enter Loney Clinton Gordon, a chemist who couldn’t get hired as a dietitian in Grand Rapids because prospective employers explained they didn’t think chefs would take orders from an African American woman. A friend mentioned her to Kendrick. Kendrick hired her (Smithsonian). Gordon’s job: find the Bordetella strain that would make the best vaccine, which mattered, since one pertussis strain can be up to 10,000 times more virulent than another. She sorted through, in her words, “millions of plates. It’s a wonder I still have eyes.”
Then one morning she found a plate with an enormous, clear halo: “My God, it was so big and so clear. It just talked to me: ‘Here I am.’”That’s the strain that went into the vaccine that saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and tens of millions worldwide. Gordon got roughly zero credit at the time. We are correcting that here.
The Trial, the Skeptical Men, and Eleanor Roosevelt
The medical establishment was, predictably, unimpressed. Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Wade Hampton Frost, asked to review the Grand Rapids trial, wrote that “the odds were strongly against Miss Kendrick’s experiment being sound” (Smithsonian). Then he visited, looked at the data, and shut up.
The first trial: 712 vaccinated kids, 4 mild cases. 880 unvaccinated controls, 63 cases, 53 serious. A roughly 15-fold difference, from two women in an ugly building with no funding.In 1936, Eleanor Roosevelt, not FDR, Eleanor, please get this right, toured the lab, understood it, and WPA funding materialized.
The follow-up trial enrolled 4,212 subjects and confirmed everything. In 1944 the AMA recommended the vaccine; in 1948 it was combined with diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and licensed as DTP (CDC Pink Book).
What Happened Next Was, Frankly, Rude to the Bacterium
Pertussis had been running the childhood mortality charts for four centuries. Then it met DTP and got humiliated in public. Reported U.S. incidence dropped from about 157 cases per 100,000 people in the pre-vaccine era to roughly 8 per 100,000 by 1960, under 5,000 total cases by 1970, and fewer than 3,000 cases a year in the 1980s, a 157-fold collapse (CDC Pink Book, Gavi).
Deaths went from 7,518 in 1934 to about 10 a year by the early 1970s (Smithsonian). Kendrick, being Kendrick, then flew to Mexico and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, to help set up production there. The bacterium was a global problem and she was not a small thinker.
The Plot Twist: The Acellular Switch
In 1997, the U.S. swapped whole-cell DTP for a stripped down acellular version (DTaP) that trades a few purified antigens for the messy whole bug approach. Fewer side effects, which is nice. But its protection wanes after just a few years, which is not (Smithsonian).
U.S. cases crept from 7,867 in 2000 to 18,617 in 2019, still a rounding error next to the 215,343 cases of 1932, but a reminder to keep boosting adolescents, adults, and pregnant patients, and to stop treating “natural immunity” like a personality.
Globally, pertussis still kills an estimated 160,700 people a year, mostly children in places where vaccine coverage is thin.
The Moral, Now With Names Attached
The vaccine that ended whooping cough in the United States was invented by two women who lived together for decades in an apple orchard, never married, birdwatched, gardened, and turned down the “Today” show because they thought it was gauche. It was made effective by an African American chemist too good for the job market of 1930s Grand Rapids, who found the perfect strain by staring at millions of petri dishes.
Grace Eldering said the vaccine shouldn’t be called the Kendrick-Eldering vaccine because “you’d have to put a whole string of names on the vaccine.” She was right, and being extremely modest. So next time someone tells you vaccines are a plot by shadowy elites, correct them: no, they were cooked up by two women bacteriologists and their brilliant colleague, after work, in a dumpy stucco building, because they were tired of watching babies die.
Whooping cough got beat by the girls’ shift. Boost your kids, boost yourself, boost in pregnancy, and tip your hat to Pearl, Grace, and Loney.
Sources
Conniff R. The Unsung Heroes Who Ended a Deadly Plague. Smithsonian Magazine, 2022. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unsung-heroes-ended-deadly-plague-180979547/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chapter 16: Pertussis — Pink Book. https://www.cdc.gov/pinkbook/hcp/table-of-contents/chapter-16-pertussis.html
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Whooping cough: a history. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/whooping-cough-history