I guess I didn't comment because it's extraordinarily difficult to explain those years to anyone who wasn't there and in the thick of them.
If you have a few hours, a decent (not perfect, from certain perspectives) documentary is "The Age of AIDS" which you can watch online for free
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/view/

These days, so much is known about HIV, it's possible to know if you have it (i.e. there is a test), we know how it's transmitted, and treatments exist. It's therefore difficult to describe the fear, the uncertainty, the devastation(while most of America had no clue that anything was going on), the horror, and the scientific mystery of the early 80s.
What Bayer did was unconscionable, and that goes without saying.
The people making the decisions at Bayer put profits above what they seemed to think would be a few lives. However, I'm not sure why this should come as a surprise to anyone. It's a corporation which has a primary goal of making profits. It made a calculation: that a few people would become infected with the virus that caused AIDS, but that this would lead to a smaller loss of revenue than changing to the new medicine and causing a panic over AIDS. It was obviously immoral, and it was also a miscalculation (they've paid WAY more money than they would have if they had just switched meds).
Was it a Conspiracy to infect people with AIDS? No, their internal documents suggest that it was driven by profits rather than malice (they didn't want people to stop using clotting factor, but they had no desire to kill off hemophiliacs in ANY country. After all, hemophiliacs were the customers they were trying to sell products to! Killing off hemophiliacs with AIDS would have been taking away their customers! Remember that the first HIV test only came out in 1985. It was only AFTER this that scientists were able to discover that there was a long, asymptomatic period before a patient became ill and died. Prior to this, it was unknown that there were so many patients who were infected, but just not sick yet. More than half of the hemophiliac population was already HIV-infected by the time the first hemophiliac in the US was diagnosed with AIDS, but this was not known at the time. Bayer probably severely underestimated the number of people who would get infected from its product). Hemophiliacs make up only a tiny percentage of the HIV-positive population, and infecting hemophiliacs is an inefficient way to spread the virus (since most of them don't spread it much further than their wife and children, if at all).
The idea that they were maliciously spreading HIV makes little sense. They have no interest in spreading HIV. It's actually contrary to their interests for their customers to get AIDS and die (at the time, AIDS was thought to be an instant death sentence). To this day, Bayer does not have a single antiretroviral drug on the market. They certainly miscalculated on the numbers: public relations nightmare and hundreds of millions paid in settled lawsuits. There are some sticky issues in the hemophiliac lawsuits (which I'll only get into if anyone is interested). When my husband was alive, he was part of a lawsuit against a blood bank, but their suit was barred.
There was certainly more that could have been done in the 1980s to protect the blood supply and to decrease the risk to hemophiliacs (although by the time it was realized that AIDS posed a threat to hemophiliacs, most of them had already been infected). Before there was an HIV test, what could have been done? Screening of donors. I think everyone now recognizes that there should have been much more stringent screening of blood and plasma donors in the early 1980s. They should have been screening for Hepatitis B, and not accepting donations from members of groups known to be at high risk (e.g. IV drug users, gay men who had had unprotected sex, Haitians). It really sucks that HIV is such a political disease, and always has been. Everyone seems to use it for their own agenda, whatever that may be. Now that there is an HIV test, the lifetime ban on blood donation from gay men will hopefully be lifted soon, as it seems to be based on homophobia rather than science.
Huge percentages of hemophiliacs were infected. In a way, there's a bit of an analogy with the gay community. Hemophilia had been a devastating illness that ran in families (almost always the men) and killed most people who were severely affected in childhood or by young adulthood - it was a very stigmatizing illness. It was only in the 1960s and 70s that clotting factors became available that allowed hemophiliacs to live relatively normal lives. Just as they were starting to live normal lifespans, not be ashamed of the condition, and when hemophilia was starting to lose its stigma, AIDS came along and hemophiliacs were suddenly subject to a whole new level of discrimination, humiliation, and physical torment (even those hemophiliacs who were not HIV-infected were sometimes assumed to be so, and were treated very badly).
My view on the Bayer story overall? Well, if the reporting is accurate, it's morally outrageous. It's quite obviously a tragedy for the families and friends of those involved (as is any AIDS death). Was it particularly important in the grand scheme of this epidemic? Nope. You don't have to look very far to find special interests such as pharmaceutical companies acting in morally outrageous ways (GSK's original pricing of AZT comes to mind as an early example). It certainly doesn't support any Conspiracy theory I can think of (if anyone thinks otherwise, I'd like to hear it, but thus far, I haven't heard a single HIV Conspiracy theory on this website that is at all coherent. Most of them don't seem to remember the history, don't seem to understand the science, and seem to be written by people who haven't passed 8th grade. To me, the giveaway is that the conspiracy theorists refuse to answer direct questions - they babble on incoherently, but can never answer a simple question).
Am I personally bitter about the failures of the blood industry and government to protect the blood supply in the 1980s? No. I don't see bitterness getting me anywhere. One could say "there is plenty of blame to go around", but with very few exceptions, nobody has been intentionally infecting others. Very few of us were infected through malice. However, many were infected through what may be considered negligence, or perhaps a few through reckless disregard for human life. But I don't see anything productive in casting blame for one's infection. Because HIV is so political, there has been a tendency since the beginning of this epidemic to "blame the victim" (I use this as a figure of speech, because I don't really consider people with HIV/AIDS to be "victims") - i.e. those with conservative social or political philosophies often have viewed gay men, sex workers, IV drug users or "oversexed Africans" as "bringing this plague on themselves". Then, there is a tendency to contrast these stigmatized groups with the so-called "innocent victims" - i.e. hemophiliacs, babies born to infected mothers, transfusion recipients, wives of men who visit prostitutes, etc. - who one should feel sympathy towards. Nobody asked for this virus, and nobody "deserves" it, so this distinction is offensive. I don't appreciate being used in this way, and I feel that blaming others for one's infection leads to more "blame-game" politics, and I don't really like where that leads. But that's my personal choice. My husband was involved in a class-action lawsuit, that was barred for reasons I won't get into, and I had no problem with his decision. I have no problem with anyone else who feels they're entitled to money from a company that owed them better screening on their blood products. HIV infection from infected blood products in the 1980s is actually a pretty complicated subject - entire books have been written on this. The Scarborough report was a bit tabloidesque, and I feel that they did not do justice to the subject. Then again, the popular media rarely does.

Again, I would recommend that you actually learn a bit about the history of the AIDS epidemic from a holistic view (since you seem to like videos, I'm recommending the Age of AIDS since it's free and online. If you'd prefer a book, which is the format I'm most comfortable in, let me know your price range and preferred length, and I'll make a recommendation).

There are actually quite a lot of activist opportunities for people who want to DO something about this rather than simply get outraged about it on the internet (many people like to complain about pharmaceutical companies being evil; fewer people are willing to actually give up their own time and money to make a difference. It is quite easy to sit behind a computer screen writing rants about how bad something is. Creating positive change actually requires effort). If anyone is interested, please ask. Let me what skills you have to offer, what sort of activism you are interested in, and I may know a group or project that may like your help.