How's this for Dark Ages human experimentation:
Like Jenner and Pasteur before him, Theiler also saw tragedy follow his vaccine. In the
early 1940s, scientists made Theiler’s vaccine using human serum obtained from several
volunteers, to stabilize the virus. Unfortunately, unnoticed at the time, at least one of these
volunteers was jaundiced, infected with hepatitis B virus. As a consequence,
more than
three hundred thousand American servicemen injected with contaminated yellow fever vaccine developed hepatitis, and sixty died.
...because Cutter researchers hadn’t properly filtered out the cells in which they grew
poliovirus, some virus particles effectively escaped the killing effects of formaldehyde. As
a consequence, more than one hundred thousand children were inadvertently injected with
live, dangerous poliovirus. Worse, children injected with Cutter’s vaccine spread polio to
others, starting the first and only manmade polio epidemic. When the dust settled, live
poliovirus contained in Cutter’s vaccine had infected two hundred thousand people; caused
about seventy thousand to develop mild polio; permanently and severely paralyzed two
hundred people, mostly children; and killed ten.
Krugman found that hepatitis developed in 90 percent of children admitted to Willowbrook soon after their arrival. Although it was known that hepatitis was caused by a virus, it wasn’t known how hepatitis virus spread, whether it could be prevented, or how many different types of viruses caused the disease. Krugman used the children of Willowbrook to answer those questions. One of his studies involved
feeding live hepatitis virus(feces) to sixty healthy children. Krugman watched as their skin and eyes turned yellow and their livers grew bigger. He watched them vomit and refuse to eat. All the children fed hepatitis virus became ill, some severely. Krugman reasoned that it was justifiable to inoculate retarded children at Willowbrook with hepatitis virus because most of them would get hepatitis anyway. But by purposefully giving the children hepatitis, Krugman increased that chance to 100 percent.
In the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, scientists often tested their vaccines in mentally retarded children. Jonas Salk tested early preparations of his polio vaccine in retarded children at the Polk State School outside of Pittsburgh. At the time of Salk’s experiments, no one in the government, the public, or the media objected to such testing. Everyone did it. Hilary Koprowski, working for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, put his experimental live polio vaccine into chocolate milk and fed it to several retarded children in Petaluma, California, and a research team at Boston Children’s Hospital used retarded children to test an experimental measles vaccine.
http://www.academia.edu/28168473/Vaccinated_One_mans_quest_to_defeat_the_worlds_deadliest_diseases
As always, the end (profit) justifies the means (humans as lab rats).