The families of two Black infant boys are suing the federal government, alleging it secretly enrolled them in a government-sponsored vaccine experiment.
Hambrick, et al. v. United States of America was filed by family attorneys Benjamin Crump, alongside co-counsels William H. Murphy Jr., Jason P. Foster, Carol D. Powell Lexing, Malcolm P. Ruff, Nabeha Shaer, and Brooke Cluse.
They allege that nearly six decades ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) secretly enrolled the Black infants as test subjects in an experimental RSV vaccine trial conducted between 1965 and 1966—without the knowledge or consent of their families.
Both babies died in January 1967.
The lawsuit was filed on May 22 in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, Southern Division. The federal government typically has 60 days to respond after service of the lawsuit, at which time they may answer or ask a judge to dismiss the case.
The Final Call has reached out to the Department of Justice for a response to the lawsuit and has not yet received a reply.
RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) is a common respiratory virus that infects the nose, throat, and lungs, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is transmitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes, through direct contact with an infected person, or by contact with a contaminated surface.
Further, while RSV usually does not pose serious health risks to healthy children and adults, older adults and children are at increased risk of severe adverse health consequences related to RSV. Symptoms include runny nose, cough, congestion, sneezing, fever, wheezing and/or loss of appetite, and in very young infants may be limited to irritability, lethargy and difficulty breathing.
“Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King were two Black babies who were used as guinea pigs, as lab rats, in a very targeted effort by the United States Government.
This follows a long history of the medical society of the United States government experimenting on Black bodies—what we believe was an epidemic of medical racism,” stated Atty. Crump, during a press conference on May 28 in Washington, D.C.
During his sweeping condemnation, he situated the case within a lineage of documented atrocities, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in Alabama, in which Black men were withheld treatment for syphilis.
Also the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks by Johns Hopkins scientists. Ms. Lacks was a Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken without consent over 70 years ago during her treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
This disturbing history also includes Black soldiers used in World War II who were given faulty gas masks and subjected to chemical exposure, and the forced sterilization of Black women in the South during routine medical procedures—known as the “Mississippi Appendectomy.”
“But today, we’re talking about these Black babies—Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor King—these innocent babies, these infants,” said Atty. Crump. “It was worst of all, because they were using babies who couldn’t talk, who couldn’t walk, who could not in any way give any type of consent.”
Specifically, the complaint alleged:
• 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.”
• Tissue samples harvested from their autopsies were preserved without the families’ knowledge.
• Decades later, NIH researchers retrieved those samples to study what went wrong – knowledge that directly informed the development of RSV vaccines approved by the FDA in 2023, now generating billions in revenue.
• The families of Ross Otto and Victor have never been compensated or acknowledged for the role the infants’ deaths played in that medical breakthrough.
“What I do remember vividly was the change in my mother,” said Sharlette Hambrick, Ross Otto’s sister. She was five years old when her baby brother died. Her mother was once funny and outgoing until the tragedy. She then became super religious and “barely let us out of her sight,” she said, reported New York Times columnist Charles Blow.
Mr. Blow reported that Victor’s older brother, Darius King, also five when his brother died, spent decades believing it was because of pneumonia. He quietly blamed his stepfather, who had taken the baby outside in the cold to show him off to friends.
That impression stuck until journalist Michael Schulson of Undark magazine contacted him in 2023 and informed him that Victor’s death was most likely caused by the experimental RSV vaccine.
The report by Undark was highlighted by Mr. Blow in 2023.
He reported that the non-profit digital magazine affiliated with M.I.T., “found that in the 1960s, some of the first and youngest subjects to receive experimental shots, in a clinical trial of early attempts to develop R.S.V. vaccines, were Black and poor children, some in foster care.
And though questions remain about what parents knew, archival documents housed at the N.I.H. suggest that parents did not give informed consent—or in some cases, any consent at all—for their children to receive the largely untested shot.”
Mr. King also expressed the sorrowful resignation of a people—Black people—who have so often been mistreated, and he reflected on the country’s checkered history, including when it comes to medical ethics, explained Mr. Blow. “That was the way America was,” said Mr. King, adding that the children who were given the experimental vaccine “were probably thought of as disposable.”
Dr. Christina X Parks, a cellular and molecular biologist, described the core scientific failure of the 1960s RSV vaccine trial:
“When they processed the virus, they tried to kill it—they changed the conformation of it, they denatured it. And the body didn’t actually recognize the adulterated or denatured form of the virus and didn’t produce the right antibodies,” she told The Final Call.
The result, she said, was a catastrophic miseducation of the immune system.
“It actually disabled their own innate immune response. It skewed their immune system, it mis-trained their immune system,” Dr. Parks explained. “The antibodies kind of bound, but in fact they sort of mis-trained the immune system to ignore the virus—to actually help the virus infect the person.”
According to Dr. Parks, the RSV trial data devastatingly manifested this, explaining that vaccine recipients were getting more ill and dying with the vaccine than without it. “And so, they (scientists) did the right thing in this case and pulled the vaccine—but they should never have been experimenting,” she said.
“It’s time for accountability,” Dr. Parks told The Final Call. “The fact that they’ve been experimenting on Black populations and Black children—low income—and they experimented on special needs children. They basically always experimented on the children and people that they thought didn’t have anybody to protect them,” she said.
During the May 28 news conference, Atty. Lexing said, “The families knew for a long time that something wasn’t right with what happened to their baby brother … to their sons.
They didn’t know that the babies had been used as infants. They did not know that the babies’ tissues had been preserved and that now the medical community is building a billion-dollar industry off the backs of these babies.”
Accountability transcends any single institution, including the federal government, said Atty. Murphy. “These families deserve honesty. They deserve the truth to be told. They deserve justice, instead of being just us.”
Houston-based attorney Pamela Muhammad said the case cuts to the heart of a long and documented history of racial exploitation in American medicine.
“History is so filled with this type of racial exploitation and experimentation and really just torture. I mean, our history is filled with this,” she told The Final Call.
Central to the complaint is the total absence of informed consent, which must be completely free from financial or physical coercion, she said. But disproportionately, Black people are given experimental substances that they haven’t agreed to. “We have a whole history of this,” she said.
She drew a direct line from the NIH lawsuit to the founding abuses of American gynecology, in which Black women’s bodies were used without anesthesia for surgical experimentation, as well to the Tuskegee syphilis study and the Henrietta Lacks case.
On the legal claims themselves, she explained, “Battery is the legal term for somebody causing bodily harm to you. We’re talking about the destruction of human lives, with intent to do it.”
While the lawsuit is a civil matter, the underlying conduct raises serious criminal questions, Atty. Muhammad explained. But it’s both significant and chilling that the defendant itself is the U.S. Government, she added.
“To actually see a suit being waged against your own country, your own ‘government’ because of their abuse of private citizens’ lives, that’s just huge. It is just horrible,” stated Atty. Muhammad.