Sound familiar?
I traced the source back to a BBC report which is still on youtube but probably will be removed by the covid censorship police in the near future.
The real story is a lot more nuanced: NPR report LINK from 2005.
Summary: These kids were sick and dying, and the experimental treatment might save their lives.
would you, as a physician, let them die, or would you give them a chance to live?
Most of the kids offered treatment had parents and were not minority, but would you offer poor kids a chance to live or let them die because they are minority and if they got side effects they might cry racism?
This problem is alas a common one. The Sioux nation, who had a wide epidemic of Hepatitis A, decided as a community to let their children get the experimental Hep A shot: which was found to work and saved lives.
But here in the Philippines, when Manila gave poor kids the Dengue vaccine (which works but not perfectly, but if given to the wrong patient can make them vulnerable to develop a severe form of Dengue).
So when a handful later died of Dengue complications brought on by the shot, because they hadn't been screened properly. The end result of that was distrust of all vaccines, so some kids didn't get their routine baby shots, and we saw minor epidemics of measles, diphtheria and polio, and some of these kids died.
Indeed, every time someone sees a side effect of a vaccine and takes it out of context and shouts it on the internet (while feeling they are a savior of mankind for doing this), the end result is dead kids. We have seen this type of disinformation campaign done repeatedly, and about nearly every vaccine being given out there.
Most of the disinformation is spread by do gooders who want to save the world: They see a tiny problem and voila take it out of context and spread the gospel of evil vaccines trying to kill you.
But sometimes the story is pushed by guilt after a child is born with developmental problems and the parents need an answer.
And alas, sometimes is it deliberate disinformation pushed by countries who want to discredit western aid to poor countries. (read Russia and China, who by the way have their own vaccines to sell you if they can get you afraid of the US or European vaccines).
One problem with the HIV experiment story is that people forget the background: That people were dying of HIV and we docs just couldn't help them.
Then came drugs that might give them a chance of life. Would you withhold it from poor minority kids, who by the way had a higher incidence of the problem than suburban white kids who might have caught it from blood transfusions?
Backstory: most people learned about HIV when it exploded in the gay community of San Francisco.
But in the early 1990s, there was another epidemic of immune deficiency, this one in children in the NYC area, and since there are congenital causes of immune deficiency, it wasn't recognized at first. Most of them got the disease prenatally from infected moms, who were drug addicts, or caught it from a partner who was a drug addict, or less often from a bisexual man.
And because in the USA, poverty is associated with race, many of these kids were minority background. Racism? Yes. but it was really because there is a nexus of poverty, bad behavior, broken families, drug abuse, neglect, and the dislike of going to doctors for minor illnesses and shot. (made worse in areas where doctors are few and often from other countries making communication difficult, and clinic waiting time is long). And this is a problem in all poor communities of all backgrounds and races.
Racism is only part of the problem, but when you are dissed, or ignored or made to wait too long, if you are a well dressed white person you figure it's just that way for everyone, but if you are minority, you suspect it might be due to racism.
Sigh.
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