The families of two Black infants who died nearly six decades ago have filed a federal lawsuit accusing the United States government of secretly using their children in dangerous RSV vaccine experiments without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump joined attorneys William H. Murphy Jr., Carol Lexing Powell, Malcolm P. Ruff and Nabeha Shaer in announcing the lawsuit on behalf of the families of Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King. The complaint, filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleges that the federal government, through the National Institutes of Health, targeted Black infants from low-income families for experimental vaccine testing in 1965 and 1966.
According to the complaint, both children were injected with what attorneys described as a highly concentrated experimental RSV vaccine known as “Lot 100.” Hambrick and King both died in January 1967.
“The complaint alleges that the United States government, through the NIH, selected the most vulnerable children it could find — Black infants from low-income families — to test a dangerous, highly concentrated experimental vaccine known as ‘Lot 100,’” the legal team stated in a release announcing the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges the children’s parents never consented to the testing and were never informed that their infants had allegedly been enrolled as test subjects in an NIH-sponsored experiment. Attorneys for the families contend that tissue samples taken during autopsies decades ago later contributed to the development of RSV vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2023.
The complaint states that the families were never compensated or formally acknowledged for what attorneys describe as the role the infants’ deaths played in the eventual vaccine development.
Crump and the legal team are demanding financial damages, full disclosure of the government’s alleged actions, and accountability from federal officials connected to the program. Attorneys representing the families said the lawsuit is also aimed at uncovering exactly how the children were selected, what their parents were told, and why the families say they remained unaware of the alleged testing for decades.
“The families of Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King deserve the truth, they deserve accountability, and they deserve justice for what was taken from them,” Crump said.
