Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is the leading cause of hospitalizations among American infants and results in thousands of deaths among the elderly each year.

So this year, after the Food and Drug Administration approved two vaccines for adults ages 60 and older, approved antibodies for babies and toddlers, and approved a vaccine for pregnant individuals to protect newborns, the new capability to effectively deal with RSV was hailed as a medical breakthrough. And it is.

But this breakthrough has a history, one tangled up in questions of medical ethics and racial exploitation.

A fascinating report published this week in Undark, a nonprofit digital magazine affiliated with MIT (I’m a member of the magazine’s advisory board), 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 RSV 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.”

According to Undark’s reporting, it appears that for some of those children, rather than offering protection from the virus, an early experimental vaccine worsened it. Two Black children in the trial died, just one day apart, as the new year dawned in 1967, both in the same Washington hospital, both little boys, neither living to see his second birthday.

One of them was 16-month-old Victor Marcellus King. His big brother, Darius King, who was 5 years old at the time, thought his brother died of pneumonia, and he blamed his stepfather, who had taken the child outside in the cold to show him off to friends. That impression remained until Undark’s Michael Schulson contacted him and told him that Victor’s death was most likely caused by an experimental RSV vaccine. But that revelation came too late for a reconciliation — his stepfather died last year.

The other boy who died was 14-month-old Ross Otto Hambrick. I spoke to his sister, Sharlette Hambrick, who was also 5 at the time of her brother’s death. She told me that she doesn’t remember her brother getting sick, or even his funeral. But, she said, “What I do remember vividly was the change in my mother.” She said her mom had been funny and outgoing, but after Ross’ death she became “super, super, super religious” and “she barely let us out of her sight.”

Schulson, who became interested in RSV vaccine research last year after his own son was hospitalized with the virus, told me that what surprised him most during his work on the story was the relative lack of surprise that family members expressed to him when they learned about how an experimental vaccine most likely played a role in how two children died.

That lack of surprise is the scar tissue that Black Americans have built up — the knowledge that the worst is always possible. The mind and spirit continually make space for it, forever hoping, but preparing contingencies for hope’s inevitable betrayal.

We have learned this from history: Undark’s reporting about Victor and Ross calls to mind infamous cases of racism in the U.S. medical establishment, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which treated Black people as disposable, and Henrietta Lacks, who was treated as dehumanized tissue at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

Tissue samples were harvested from the boys’ dead bodies, Undark reports. Not only did researchers study the tissue samples, finding that the vaccine fatally altered the boys’ immune response, but “Over five decades, scientists publish dozens of papers drawing on clinical data of the boys who died.” In light of that, it’s hard not to think of the deaths of those boys as part of the journey that led to the breakthrough of today’s vaccines.

But as is often the case, the question comes down to the issues of justice, reparations and restoration: What are the families of the children involved in those experiments, particularly the families of Victor and Ross, now owed?

Undark reported that Victor’s family members recall the family receiving a modest payment after his death: “funeral expenses, plus $1,000 — around $9,000 today, adjusting for inflation.”

This year alone, sales of the new RSV vaccines are expected to be in the billions of dollars.

How should the country make this right with these families? As Schulson said, “I’m sure there are many more stories just like this one.”

Charles M. Blow is a columnist for The New York Times, where a longer version of this piece originally appeared.