The families of two Black infants who were unknowingly enrolled as test subjects in a mid-1960s vaccine trial for a respiratory virus and died shortly afterward have sued the United States government.
Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King were just a few months old when they were administered a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., at a children’s clinic in Washington, D.C., between 1965 and 1966 without their families’ knowledge or consent, according to a lawsuit filed on May 22. Both died from the disease, coupled with bacterial pneumonia, about a year later, when Ross Otto was 14 months old and Victor 16 months.
Their families are now accusing the federal government of wrongful death, lack of informed consent and civil battery in a lawsuit filed on May 22. They are also asking for an unspecified amount of financial relief, because sample tissues taken from the boys’ autopsies were crucial to developing the R.S.V. vaccine that is now used around the world.
The lawsuit is in response to a 2023 investigation by Undark Magazine, a nonprofit digital magazine affiliated with M.I.T., which discovered Victor and Ross Otto’s names in a doctor’s government-issue laboratory notebook along with a long paper trail of records. The families were not aware of the connection to the study until a reporter from the magazine contacted them.
“It was never about the health and safety of these babies,” the civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, whose firm is representing the families, said at a news conference on Thursday. “It was all about the ruthless pursuit of getting the vaccine to get to market, to turn it into profit.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
R.S.V. is a leading cause of infant mortality around the globe, and especially dangerous to prematurely born babies. Symptoms present as the common cold but can worsen. The vaccine took decades to develop.
In the 1960s, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, led by Dr. Robert Chanock, whose notebook was cited in the investigation, sought to create an R.S.V. vaccine. By 1965, they had begun human trials on a version of the vaccine known as Lot 100, administering it at health clinics around Washington.
That August, Victor Marcellus King was born, and was quick to walk and talk. Ross Otto Hambrick, born in October, was known for his plump cheeks and his full head of hair.
They were two of least 31 children who were part of the trial. Most, if not all, were children from Black, low-income families. They received three doses of the vaccine, even as hospitalizations continued to rise from the trial, according to the lawsuit.
In November 1966, the director of the children’s hospital that oversaw the clinics warned researchers at a conference that “Lot 100 could be causing some children to become violently ill upon contracting R.S.V. as opposed to effectively resisting the virus,” the lawsuit said.
A month later, a large R.S.V. outbreak hit Washington. On Dec. 30, Victor was hospitalized with respiratory problems. That same day, Ross Otto developed an intensifying cough and grew short of breath. He was admitted to the hospital that afternoon.
Victor died on Jan. 1 and Ross Otto on Jan. 2. According to the lawsuit, the director of the hospital had decided it was time to stop the trial on Dec. 29.
After their deaths, researchers saved tissue samples from their lungs. Their lung tissue was central to decades of research that eventually developed a vaccine, the suit said. In 2023, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first R.S.V. vaccine.
It is unclear if the families signed any release forms, but ethics systems were in place for doctors to obtain permission, said Harriet Washington, a bioethicist and author of “Medical Apartheid.” While modern laws to regulate medical research did not exist in the 1950s and 1960s, ethical codes were often supported by hospitals and physician organizations.
Still, they were “routinely ignored” for some groups, she said.
“If you were a wealthy white man, you could be pretty sure of people being careful to ask your permission before enrolling you in research, of people of being careful to tell you what they were doing, why they thought it would work,” Ms. Washington said. “But if you were a Black child in an institution, you were not afforded that.”
Unethical research involving disenfranchised groups dates back hundreds of years. Cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, without her consent in 1951 while she had cervical cancer. In the 1960s, a neurosurgery professor at the University of Mississippi performed 30 to 40 lobotomies and other types of brain surgery on Black children and people with behavioral problems who had been institutionalized. And over the course of 40 years, in what became known as the Tuskegee study, the U.S. Public Health Service followed African American men infected with syphilis and didn’t treat them so that they could see the disease take its course. The government didn’t end the study until 1972.
