Two families say their babies were used as test subjects in a government-backed vaccine trial they never agreed to, and that the babies died soon after. A new lawsuit accuses the US government of wrongful death, lack of informed consent, and civil battery over a mid-1960s experiment in Washington, DC, involving an early respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine known as Lot 100, per the New York Times. The suit says Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King, who were just a few months old at the time, were given three doses at a children's clinic serving low-income Black families. Each of the boys later died of RSV and bacterial pneumonia. Their families say they had no idea the babies were part of an experimental trial.
The case follows a 2023 Undark investigation that traced the boys' names through a National Institutes of Health researcher's lab notebook and other records. According to the suit, lung tissue taken during the babies' autopsies became key to decades of RSV research, contributing to an RSV vaccine being approved in 2023, which is "now generating billions in revenue," per a release from civil rights attorney Ben Crump. Crump, who's representing the families, argues that the babies' safety was sacrificed in pursuit of a marketable product, per the Times. A hospital director had warned in 1966 that Lot 100 might be worsening illness in some cases, the lawsuit says, and moved to halt the trial just days before the boys died. The Justice Department hasn't commented.
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