Lawsuit Filed as Decades-Old Unethical Vaccine Trial Comes to Light

A doctor friend of mine attended a medical conference many years ago. A German doctor gave a medical presentation on the eye, complete with pictures. There was much interesting information given until the question-and-answer period, when another expert in the field stood up and stated that there was no way to have collected this information unless the patient, rather than being dead, was still alive. The doctor made a hasty exit.

Mary Shelley's fictional character Dr. Frankenstein was a far-darting gaze into the future we now inhabit. Dean Koontz's Frankenstein series brings this ghoulish logic up to date. There are more laws passed, more rules made, but the utilitarian logic that an innocent man must die so others may live is as old as the trial of Jesus.

A new lawsuit has been filed in a case involving two black infants in a mid-1960s vaccine trial allegedly made without their families' knowledge or consent. Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King were only a few months old when they received an experimental respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine at a Washington, D.C., children's clinic between 1965 and 1966.

The lawsuit claims that neither family gave informed consent, and both were unaware that their children participated in the study. At approximately 14-16 months of age, RSV infections, combined with bacterial pneumonia, killed both infants, who seemed to have been thriving until then. The federal government is accused in the lawsuit of wrongful death, lack of informed consent, and civil battery. The suit claims that tissue samples taken from the boys' autopsies were crucial in developing the RSV vaccine now used globally. The vaccine was approved by the FDA in 2023.

In 2023, Undark Magazine, a non-profit publication associated with MIT, uncovered the boys' names in a government laboratory notebook. This is allegedly the first time these families knew they were part of the clinical trial. The Hambrick and King families are now being represented by civil rights lawyer Ben Crump and his firm. According to the complaint, at least 31 children received the Lot 100 vaccine formulation. Most or all were black children from low-income families. They were given multiple doses despite the rising number of hospitalizations associated with Lot 100.

An early warning was made in November 1966, when a hospital director said that Lot 100 might be making children severely ill when they later contracted RSV. In late 1966, a large RSV outbreak hit Washington, D.C. On January 1, 1967, Victor died, and on January 2, Ross died. Researchers saved the lung tissue from both infants. These samples played a key role in later RSV vaccine research.

Whether it is the Nurse Ratcheds who administer large vaccine doses to infants without parental consent, or the Dr. Frankensteins who withhold hydration or employ large morphine drips designed to kill sick patients, or the misuse of the term "brain death," legal safeguards and ethical rules aren't enough. A healthy dose of skepticism is required to ensure parental and patients' rights are not negated by mouse-type medical forms signed in a moment of crisis. The National Catholic Bioethics Center is one of the watchdog groups tracking the ever-moving target of dubious medical practices. They are worth consulting when a loved one is in a difficult medical situation.

Bioethicist Harriet Washington said to the New York Times that research ethics laws were weaker in the 1950s-60s. But ethical consent norms existed. In the United States, Africa, and Latin America, these norms have often been ignored to this day. This lawsuit tries to connect this case to a longer history of unethical medical experimentation on black Americans, including the Tuskegee syphilis study and the unauthorized use of Henrietta Lacks' cells, which are still being used by researchers today, 74 years after her death.

The families say the government deliberately targeted vulnerable black infants from poor families for this high-risk experimental vaccine. Attorney Ben Crump is claiming compensation since the biological samples were neither authorized nor recognized in the development of the new vaccine. He claims this case is part of a pattern of disenfranchised back patients used in research without informed consent.

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