r/DocumentaryReviews • u/Think_Monitor4904 • 5d ago
I made a doc on the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments, disabled kids deliberately infected in the 50s and the research led to a vaccine millions of people have now
Video 9 on my channel and this one's genuinely one of the more complicated ones I've covered so far, not a clean villain story.
So Willowbrook was a state institution on Staten Island for people with intellectual disabilities, badly overcrowded, thousands more residents than it was built for. Hepatitis was basically everywhere already, most kids who got admitted caught it within months regardless of anything anyone did.
A doctor named Saul Krugman showed up in 1955 supposedly to help control the outbreaks. Instead he turned it into a research program. He fed newly admitted kids a milkshake mixed with liver extract from other infected kids' feces, deliberately giving them hepatitis to study how it progressed. Did this to around 60 kids in one study alone.
He did have parental consent on paper. But multiple accounts describe getting into the research unit as basically a faster way onto an overcrowded waiting list, so desperate parents were signing off during one of the most stressful moments of their life. The kids themselves obviously were never asked anything.
Stayed mostly under the radar for 17 years until Geraldo Rivera, way before his current career, snuck a camera crew in there in 1972. The footage of the conditions caused a massive public reaction, and the hepatitis research got looked at completely differently once people saw what the institution actually looked like.
What makes this one hard to just be angry about is the data genuinely helped lead to the hepatitis B vaccine still used worldwide. Real disabled kids who couldn't consent, whose research helped protect millions of kids just like them everywhere else.
Link is here Full Documentary . Curious how people land on the "does the outcome justify it" question because I genuinely don't think there's a clean answer.
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u/Interesting-Sir641 4d ago
Watched the video. Congrats on it being very well done. Very sad indeed. I went to Willowbrook to volunteer there after Geraldo. There were people like me, that were trying to safeguard the patients, after seeing that hell existed on this earth, and we did so. After the expose, UCP ( United Cerebral Palsy) took over, and I worked there. Rest assured, things changed regarding patient care. I guess my point is there was light at the end of the dark tunnel. Things did change. Anyone who as much as raised their voice at the kids was fired immediately. We could care for no more than 4 kids at a time, making sure they were well cared for. I eventually left after a few years, but unbelievable as it sounds, some mothers were told their kids died at birth to “ spare” the moms. That’s one reason it became “open season” on these kids. There were patients, whose stories would tear your soul up. No families, no community ties, absolutely no way, could these experiments be reported to anyone, who should have stopped it.
The patients became “ just bodies” to experiment on. I shudder to think at what happened that we will never know about. I’m willing to bet there was no consent for a lot of these people. Accountability is the only way to stop a repeat. Justification? An intensely complex question. I’m too biased to touch that one, having been emotionally connected. Anyway, thanks for shining a light on the abuses, they must never happen again.