Families sue over 1960s RSV vaccine trial deaths of Black infants

Two Black infants were allegedly entered into an NIH-backed RSV vaccine trial without their parents’ knowledge, then died in January 1967, a history their families say they only recently uncovered. The federal lawsuit names Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King and says the boys were secretly enrolled in the experimental trial known as Lot 100 in 1965 and 1966.

The complaint, filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, says Hambrick was two months old and King was four months old when they received the first dose. It alleges the U.S. government and the National Institutes of Health selected vulnerable Black infants from low-income families for testing. The case centers on a respiratory virus that remains a major public health threat and is described as a leading cause of hospitalization among infants in the United States.

Attorneys for the families say tissue samples from the boys’ autopsies were later used in research that helped shape RSV vaccine development. The suit links that work to vaccines approved by federal regulators in 2023 and to billions of dollars in later revenue, raising questions not only about who bore the risks in the 1960s but also about who benefited from the science that followed.

The filing arrives against the backdrop of a research field long shadowed by past harm. In 1967, two toddlers immunized with a formalin-inactivated RSV vaccine died from enhanced RSV disease, a devastating outcome that pushed scientists to proceed cautiously for decades. That history is central to modern RSV vaccine development, which has had to reckon with the danger of making later infections worse rather than preventing them.

The lawsuit also echoes other chapters in U.S. medical abuse, including the Tuskegee syphilis study, for which President Bill Clinton formally apologized in 1997. That apology did not close the book on how Black families were treated in research, and this case suggests the memory gap remains wide. The families say they did not know the alleged trial involvement until recently, even though the boys’ deaths and the research tied to them helped shape a vaccine era that is still unfolding.

At its core, the case asks whether informed consent existed at all for some of the youngest and most vulnerable subjects in American medical history. It also underscores why the consent rules and oversight systems that govern research today were built in response to abuses that many families are still only now learning about.