I have had to take the human research course on ethical human studies.
To test a drug in a child there must be a compelling reason.
The benefit has to out weigh the risk.
Since the risk of the disease with no treatment is death, I am not sure any outrage is justified.
The foster parents gave consent to treatment.
What disease?
These kids do not have an HIV "infection". There was no detectable HIV in their bodies. All they have are is a positive result on an antibody test.
Furthermore, the antibody test was not developed using isolated HIV. Because nobody had isolated HIV when they developed the test.
There was no reason to believe these kids were any danger whatsoever.
We live with an uncountable number of retroviruses. They're everywhere -- and they probably have been here as long as the human race. We have them in our genome. We get some of them from our mothers in the form of new viruses -- infectious viral particles that can move from mother to fetus. We get others from both parents along with our genes. We have resident sequences in our genome that are retroviral. That means that we can and do make our own retroviral particles some of the time. Some of them may look like H.I.V. No one has shown that they've ever killed anyone before. -Kary Mullis, Nobelist, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction.
More on the subject: HIV; REALITY OR ARTEFACT