Sometimes the accidents of history are a marvel to behold.

In 1954, in a city famous for birthing the American Revolution and later the dynastic Kennedy clan, there was an outbreak of measles. 

Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital went to a boarding school just outside their city where the disease was flaring up. They began to collect throat swabs from patients. 

They took a sample from the mouth of 11-year-old schoolboy David Edmonston and used it to cultivate and isolate the virus.

From that specimen they were able to develop the first vaccine against measles, according to a World Health Organization report. 

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Their monumental achievement would soon grow clear as a measles vaccine was eventually licensed and administered to the people of the United States and beyond. It would save millions of lives.

To this day, the “Edmonston-B” strain, named for the boy in Boston, is “used as the basis for most live-attenuated (measles) vaccines,” according to the WHO. 

In that same year, 1954, Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, gave birth to their third of 11 children, a baby boy named after dad — Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.

Today, that boy is one of the foremost vaccine skeptics in the world, a man who has criticized the very measles vaccine that was developed in the year of his birth in the city where Kennedy family fame rose to mythical proportions.

Last week, RFK Jr. scaled a wall of angry opposition to

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