From 1929 to 1933, 251 infants in Lübeck, northern Germany, were given three doses of the oral BCG vaccine against tuberculosis, which was accidentally contaminated with the bacteria responsible for the disease. 173 later developed signs of the illness and 72 died.^[1][2]

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (November 2021) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,120 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Lübecker Impfunglück]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Lübecker Impfunglück}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

This vaccine itself was initially blamed, until an inquiry headed by Bruno Lange [de] of the Robert Koch Institute and Ludwig Lange of the Ministry of Health identified contamination as the cause. The event later became known as the Lübeck disaster,^[1][2] or in German, the Lübecker Impfunglück (Lübeck vaccine disaster). Major scientific journals worldwide commented on the disaster and subsequent trials of the medical staff, such as The Lancet^[3] and the Journal of the American Medical Association.^[4]

On 6 February 1932, Georg Deycke [de], the head of the general hospital in Lübeck, was found guilty of negligent homicide and negligent bodily harm, and sentenced to two years in prison.^[5] Deycke negligently cultivated the BCG vaccine in a laboratory unsuitable for vaccine production and refrained from animal experiments. Ernst Altstaedt was sentenced to 15 months in prison for negligent homicide and negligent bodily harm as he did not test the vaccine in animal experiments and only insufficiently observed the children. The co-accused chairman of the Lübeck health department, Max Klotz, was acquitted, as was Deycke's laboratory assistant, Anna Schütze.^[6]

Despite the investigation's finding that contamination caused by laboratory error (not the BCG vaccine itself) was the cause of the deaths, the Lübeck disaster diminished public confidence in, and usage of, the BCG vaccine for a time.^[7][8] After the tragedy, the oral route of administration for BCG vaccine was discontinued.^[9] It was replaced by alternate, improved methods of administration for the BCG vaccine: intradermal (ID) (introduced 1927), multiple puncture (1939), and scarification (1947). The First International BCG Congress in Paris, held in 1948, concluded that the BCG vaccine was safe and effective.^[10] With the BCG vaccine's safety and effectiveness established, and new methods of administration, confidence in the BCG vaccine was restored, and mass vaccination campaigns resumed globally.^[7][8] Compulsory BCG vaccination of infants was reinstated in East Germany in 1952.^[11]