Critical criminology repeatedly has drawn attention to the state-corporate nexus as a site of corruption and other forms of criminality, a scenario exacerbated by the intensification of neoliberalism in areas such as health. The state-pharmaceutical relationship, which increasingly influences health policy, is no exception. That is especially so when pharmaceutical products such as vaccines, a burgeoning sector of the industry, are mandated in direct violation of the principle of informed consent. Such policies have provoked suspicion and dissent as critics question the integrity of the state-pharma alliance and its impact on vaccine safety. However, rather than encouraging open debate, draconian modes of governance have been implemented to repress and silence any form of criticism, thereby protecting the activities of the state and pharmaceutical industry from independent scrutiny. The article examines this relationship in the context of recent legislation in Australia to intensify its mandatory regime around vaccines. It argues that attempts to undermine freedom of speech, and to systematically excoriate those who criticise or dissent from mandatory vaccine programs, function as a corrupting process and, by extension, serve to provoke the notion that corruption does indeed exist within the state-pharma alliance. KeywordsState-corporate harm; mandated vaccines; informed consent; neoliberalism. Please cite this article as:

This paper reflects on the mistakes, the lessons learned and the successes of interviewing Russian entrepreneurs known to devote at least some, if not all, of their operations to illegal business.

Unethical human experimentation has long been a murky feature of medical research, most notoriously in the death camps of Nazi Germany. Despite the subsequent creation of the Nuremberg Code principles for the protection of human subjects, harmful medical trials continue to be conducted in the name of scientific inquiry and for the advancement of public health. Most, but not all, of the victims are marginalized groups, racially, ethnically and/or socio-economically defined, those for whom justice is often little more than a utopian hope. The article examines the violence behind the beneficent arm of the state in its role as health provider, and how the collaboration with medical science and the pharmaceutical industry have resulted in laboratories of human suffering involving society's most vulnerable. By locating the abuse of human subjects of medical research within the paradigm of state crime the article highlights the growing propensity for serious harm and abuse, diluted by the more common use of the term unethical rather than “criminal”, as a consequence of this state, public health and corporate triumvirate.

Despite a number of beneficent outcomes, clinical trials on human subjects have exposed some of the worst forms of state crime, most notably in Nazi Germany. Even with the subsequent establishment of guidelines for the protection of human subjects, such as the Nuremberg Code, clinical trials resulting in death and injury is a continuing feature of medical research, especially as Western states outsource more trials to the private sector where profit margins often trump personal safety. Focusing on the clinical trials business in India, the article argues that the exploitation of human subjects in developing countries, affecting as it does the most vulnerable groups, must be understood as a form of state‐corporate crime. In this way, the moral distance we prefer to place between Nazi medical crimes and those committed in the interests of neoliberal values becomes less viable and the need for effective responses to unethical clinical trials more pressing.