Fed Used Black Infants for Medical Trials, Suit Alleges

In a chilling echo of America’s history of unauthorized medical experimentation on Black communities, a bombshell federal lawsuit claims two healthy Black infants served as secret test subjects for a government-sponsored vaccine, whose lives were cut short just after their first birthdays.

The tragedy began in the bitter winter of 1965. Inside a Washington, D.C. hospital and without their parents’ consent, two-month-old Ross Otto Hambrick and four-month-old Victor Marcellus King were allegedly injected with “Lot 100,” a highly experimental National Institutes of Health (NIH) RSV vaccine, according to a federal complaint.

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a highly contagious virus that usually mirrors a mild cold in healthy adults, but attacks the lungs and breathing passages, the Mayo Clinic said. For infants and the elderly, the virus can be fatal.

The horrific details of the experiment, outlined in the lawsuit filed on May 22 by civil rights attorney Ben Crump and a coalition of legal co-counsel, cites how both boys grew gravely ill the following year. 16-month-old Victor took his last breath on New Year’s Day, 1967. The very next morning, so did 14-month-old Ross.

Their lungs, according to the lawsuit, weren’t ravaged by the virus itself, but by an immune response from the government’s vaccine, coupled with bacterial pneumonia. Following the infants’ sudden deaths, medical officials quietly harvested and preserved tissue samples during their autopsies.

Decades later, NIH researchers pulled those decades-old tissue samples from storage, using the boy’s alleged stolen cells to determine why Lot 100 had been so lethal. That stolen knowledge became crucial to developing the RSV vaccine now used around the world, according to The New York Times, plus antibody treatments approved by the FDA in 2023.

Said treatments are now projected to generate billions in global sales while “the families of Ross Otto and Victor have never been compensated, acknowledged, or informed of the role their sons’ deaths and tissues played in that scientific breakthrough,” according to Crump.

The lawsuit asserts claims of wrongful death, lack of informed consent and civil battery, especially considering how the NIH “knew the prior RSV vaccine had failed,” co-counsel William H. Murphy, Jr. said. “They knew Lot 100 had barely been tested. They knew these infants were at the highest possible risk. And they pressed forward anyway — in communities of color, on children whose parents were never given the chance to say no,” Murphy, Jr. added.

Years earlier, the NIH’s initial formulation was tested on at least 31 children at a hospital known for its large Black, low-income population, The New York Times reported.

Despite children falling violently ill during the early trials, the NIH’s lead respiratory virus researcher, Dr. Robert Chanock, downplayed the crisis, allegedly admitting that the rate of hospitalizations was “possibly outside the range of normal.”

Instead of halting the dangerous research, the NIH pressed forward anyway, allegedly testing the vaccine on Ross and Victor.

Ben Crump called the tragedy “one of the most egregious examples of racial exploitation in the history of American medicine.” He claims the NIH made Black babies “expendable by the very government that was supposed to protect them” for profit.

“Their deaths were not accidents; they were the foreseeable result of an NIH program that chose the most powerless children it could find, injected them with an inadequately tested and dangerous experimental vaccine without telling their parents, and then, when those babies died, preserved their tissue to mine for scientific profit,” Crump continued. “The families of Ross Otto and Victor have waited nearly sixty years for justice. This lawsuit is the first step toward finally providing it.”

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