The Wound Is Real. So Is the Danger

A decades-old betrayal. A present-day crisis. Both demand our attention.

Let's start with the truth: Black people in America have been lied to, experimented on, and discarded by the medical establishment for as long as there has been a medical establishment. That is history. And history has a way of making the present complicated.

Right now, two NYTimes stories are sitting side by side in the news, and together they capture exactly why so many of us feel pulled in two directions at once.

The first story is about two Black baby boys—Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King—who were enrolled in an experimental vaccine trial in Washington, D.C. in the 1960s without their families knowing. Both babies died. Their families had no idea their sons had been used as test subjects until a reporter contacted them nearly sixty years later.

The second story is about what is happening in hospitals right now, today, as vaccination rates decline across the country. Doctors are seeing children sick with diseases that vaccines nearly wiped out: whooping cough, rotavirus, bacterial pneumonia. Some of those children are not going to be okay.

These two stories do not cancel each other out. They belong together. And we must be willing to hold them both.

Ross Otto and Victor Deserved Better. Their Families Deserve Justice.

Ross Otto Hambrick was born in October 1965. He had plump cheeks and a full head of hair. Victor Marcellus King was born that August—quick to walk, quick to talk. They were babies. They were somebody's whole world.

Between 1965 and 1966, researchers at the National Institutes of Health were running trials on an experimental RSV vaccine called "Lot 100" at health clinics around Washington, D.C. Most of the children enrolled—possibly all of them—were from Black, low-income families. Their parents were not told their children were part of a study. They did not consent.

By November 1966, hospital leaders were already raising alarms. Records show the director of the children's hospital warned researchers at a conference that the vaccine could be making children sicker, not protecting them. More than a month passed. The trial kept going. Ross Otto and Victor kept receiving doses.

In late December, a major RSV outbreak hit Washington. Victor was hospitalized on December 30th. Ross Otto was admitted that same afternoon. The hospital director decided to stop the trial on December 29th—one day before both boys were hospitalized.

Victor died on January 1, 1967. Ross Otto died the next day.

After their deaths, researchers preserved tissue samples from their lungs. That tissue was central to decades of RSV research. In 2023, the FDA approved the first RSV vaccine—a vaccine that exists, in part, because of what was taken from these two little boys without anyone's knowledge or permission.

"It was never about the health and safety of these babies," attorney Ben Crump said at a news conference. "It was all about the ruthless pursuit of getting the vaccine to get to market, to turn it into profit."

The families are now suing the federal government for wrongful death, lack of informed consent, and civil battery. They are asking for financial relief—in part because the tissue taken from their sons helped generate a product that is now sold around the world.

They did not find out the truth until a reporter from Undark Magazine called them. Not until 2023. Not until their sons had been gone for more than fifty years.

Harriet Washington, a bioethicist and author of Medical Apartheid, noted that ethical codes requiring informed consent existed as far back as the 1940s. They were simply not applied equally. "If you were a Black child in an institution," she said, "you were not afforded that."

This case is not an outlier. It is part of a pattern. Henrietta Lacks had her cells taken without consent in 1951. The Tuskegee study followed Black men infected with syphilis for forty years without treating them. A neurosurgery professor at the University of Mississippi performed dozens of lobotomies on Black children and institutionalized people in the 1960s. The list is long. The harm is real. And the anger it produces is righteous.

And Yet—Our Children Are Getting Sick Right Now

Here is the other truth we have to hold at the same time.

Doctors across the country are sounding the alarm. They are seeing diseases come back that vaccines had nearly eliminated. In their hospitals. In their exam rooms. This week.

A pediatric hospitalist in Alabama treated more children with rotavirus this year than she had seen in the previous decade combined. Every single one of them was unvaccinated. Rotavirus once caused tens of thousands of hospitalizations a year in the United States before vaccines changed that equation. Now it is coming back.

A doctor in Fairhope, Alabama recently treated a toddler sick with two bacterial infections at the same time—Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae. Both can be prevented by routine childhood vaccines. That child needed antibiotics and oxygen to survive.

Infants four to six weeks old are being treated for whooping cough. They stop breathing after coughing fits. Many of these babies do not have anti-vaccine parents. They are simply too young to be vaccinated yet, and the disease is circulating more because vaccination rates around them have dropped.

There were more than 28,000 reported whooping cough cases in the United States last year. In 2023, there were around 7,000.

Emergency room doctors are now ordering spinal taps on unvaccinated children with high fevers to rule out infections that vaccinated children are protected from. That is a painful, invasive procedure on a sick child, because the risk profile of an unvaccinated child is so much higher.

"It just feels like you're a tiny little boat with a giant tidal wave coming at you," said one pediatric hospitalist in Seattle. "And you might convince one family here and there."

Many parents whose children have been hospitalized with vaccine-preventable illnesses still refuse to vaccinate. Doctors say they rarely change their minds, even after watching their child suffer.

And the trend is expanding beyond vaccines. Doctors are reporting parents refusing vitamin K injections for newborns—a shot that prevents dangerous bleeding. Five doctors described seeing brain or abdominal hemorrhages in infants whose parents said no. One of those infants died. Another was left partially paralyzed.

The diseases that are resurfacing do not care about our grievances with the medical system. They do not care what was done to Ross Otto and Victor. They will move through unprotected children the same way they always have.

This Is the Hardest Thing We Have to Say

The system that experimented on Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King without their families' consent is the same system that produced the vaccines our children need today. We did not design that system. We did not ask for this position. But we are in it.

Mistrust of the medical establishment among Black Americans is earned. It is documented. It is the entirely reasonable response to a history of being used, discarded, and lied to. Anyone who dismisses that history—or tries to talk us out of our wariness with a simple "just trust the science"—does not understand what we have been through, and frankly, they are not the ones we are listening to anyway.

And.

Vaccine-preventable diseases kill children. Black children. Our children. Whooping cough does not exempt a baby because her grandmother remembers Tuskegee. Rotavirus does not check a family's history before landing a toddler in the hospital for four days on an IV. The grief of losing a child to a preventable disease is the same grief no matter who made the vaccine or what was done to get there.

We are allowed to demand justice for Ross Otto and Victor and still vaccinate our children. In fact, honoring what happened to those babies means refusing to let more babies be harmed—in any direction. Protecting our children is not giving the system a pass. It is protecting our children.

Demanding accountability for the past and protecting our children in the present are not opposing actions. They are both acts of love.

What We Can Do

We can hold the full story. We can tell our children and grandchildren what was done to Ross Otto and Victor, and we can also make sure their well-child visits are current. We can push for accountability in how research is conducted—particularly in communities of color—and we can push back against the misinformation that is filling the space that distrust creates.

We can ask our doctors hard questions. We can demand to know what we are consenting to. We can require transparency. None of that is at odds with keeping our families protected.

NIAAH exists because Black health history matters. Because the truth about what has been done to our bodies, our families, and our communities needs to be told completely and honestly. And because that truth—all of it—is what allows us to make informed decisions going forward.

Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King deserved to grow up. Their families deserved the truth. We honor them by staying informed, staying engaged, and staying fiercely committed to the health and survival of the children who are here right now.

Sources: "Suit Says Black Infants Were Subjected to Experimental Vaccine Without Consent" and "Hospitals See Diseases Resurge as Vaccinations Decline," The New York Times, 2026. The National Institute for African American Health (NIAAH).