Hello. If this isn't an appropriate sub to ask this I sincerely apologize and would love direction to another sub to be answered.
I was talking to my grandmother about vaccinations for my 6 week old, just bsing, when she told me this anecdote: Every Friday, at school, the children would line up and be given a sugar cube with a pill in it. Then, they would go to another line and be given a shot in the arm. No parents were ever asked permission and they never told the children what they were doing to them. Literally, it was never questioned. This would be in the early to mid sixties.
I assumed the government was just doing human experiments on poor, rural kids in Texas most of which had non English speaking families (only kind of kidding) and then my Pawpaw mentioned they did the same thing in Puerto Rico around the same time. My family is very curious as to what my grandparents had been given and Google didn't really give me an answer so I thought I'd ask you, good people of Reddit. Thanks, ya'll!
Memory is a tricky thing to be sure, especially when it comes to things that happen in school. Though it's impossible to say for sure, the details line up with children's experiences with the polio vaccinations. According to Heather Green Wooten's dissertation, The Polio Years in Harris and Galveston Counties, 1930-1962, there was a massive effort to eliminate polio in the state that included two different vaccinations administered in different ways. Salk's vaccination included shots while Sabin's was administered via sugar cubes. Children typically received doses of both.
Wooten's review of the historical record suggests it was an all hands on deck effort and everyone across the state was committed to the idea of herd immunity. Although the majority of vaccinations were given in clinics held in schools on Sundays, there were instances of clinics happening during the school hours.
One of the details in your recollection that's proving a little challenging is the timeline. The detail of repeated doses suggests your grandmother participated in vaccination trials but those happened in the mid-1950's in multiple states, including Texas. Wooten writes, "In the mind of Texans, finding a cure for polio was a responsibility." (p. 210) Parental consent paperwork looked very different during that era as did the sentiment around vaccinations. Virtually everyone knew someone who had been struck by polio and if a cure was possible, volunteering your child to participate in the research for a cure was a no-brainer. In effect, it wasn't discussed or questioned because not participating was inconceivable to the general public. Every aspect of life was saturated with information about the trials and ways parents could help. Wooten writes about the variety of ways public health officials educated the public and references translated resources used in Spanish-speaking enclaves. It appears as if the only children who didn't participate were those who had obvious and severe health issues. Once the trials began, some children received the preliminary Salk vaccination while others had blood drawn to act as a control. Students were pulled out of class once a week for up to six subsequent weeks which matches her recollection.
If we set aside polio vaccinations, it's possible your grandmother participated in an MMR vaccination trial but by time those happened in the mid to late 1960's, parental consent requirements had tightened up and the trials were typically done in areas near large medical centers. If you talk to her again and she says she remembers getting her polio vaccination and this wasn't that, please update the post and I'll be happy to dive back in.