Louis Pasteur Myths

by Asa Boxer

Sep 24, 2023

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**Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)**. Image: Pasteur Institute.

Okay. Louis Pasteur. There’s a hero, cured that kid of rabies, right? Not so fast. Pasteur was a top tier fraud. Horace Freeland Judson tells us about this discovery in his The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. The man who stumbled upon this fiasco was Gerald Geison—science historian at Princeton—who wrote about it in his book The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, published in 1995. It took over a hundred years to expose Pasteur’s fraud because “In his lifetime he had allowed no one, not even his closest collaborators, to look into his notebooks. By his command to his family, after his death they had been closed to all.” But “In 1964, Pasteur’s last surviving direct male descendent gave the notebooks to the Bibliotheque Nationale as part of an immense, uncatalogued archive,” and “Only in 1971 did they become available.” Another 20 years or so to sort through the mess and Geison couldn’t believe what he’d found—troubling evidence of fraud:

Geison asserted among much else that at the two crucial, acclaimed demonstrations of his work—the vaccination of sheep against anthrax and the inoculation of the boy Joseph Meister against rabies—Pasteur had significantly misled scientists and the public about the vaccines he used, his methods of preparing them, and his previous tests of their safety and efficacy.1

Immunology and vaccinology were off to a bad start. But that’s not the story as TheScience™ tells it. And reactions to Geison’s discoveries have been unhinged. Here’s a passage from Judson’s indispensable book:

Eminent scientists were angered. Not only the French were upset. Max Perutz, for example, reviewed Geison for the New York Review of Books. (Perutz was a very senior crystallographer, who got his Nobel prize for elucidating the molecular structure of hemoglobin. Though he didn’t say so in the review, Pasteur had been a boyhood hero.) He wrote, in incandescent rage and among much else, that Geison was setting himself up as judge over a scientist whose work he failed to understand. “Geison,” Perutz wrote, “rather than Pasteur, seems to me guilty of unethical and unsavory conduct when he burrows through Pasteur’s notebooks for scraps of supposed wrongdoing and then inflates them out of all proportion.” Succinctly, Perutz in a telephone conversation told me the book was “complete rubbish” and said that Geison was “trying to find things to pull a great man down.”2

Perutz’s reaction was like a child upon first learning that Santa doesn’t exist only with choice vocabulary. For those unfamiliar with The New York Review of Books, each essay is generally a book in itself. I can only imagine the hours-long, days-long fit Perutz must have suffered, stamping his foot and insisting that Santa does exist; he must after all or it spoils the whole story. Spoil away as far as I’m concerned because both immunology and vaccinology are the most pseudoscientific of the sciences practiced today. These fields are worse than the extravagances of quantum theory and blackholology because they are about our personal and public health, and as demonstrated in “Scientism Subverts Secular Society: A Case Study,” the same sort of fraud pervades the field now as did at its inception. “From the beginning,” Judson informs us, “a tension has persisted between molecular biologists and immunologists.” Apparently “classical molecular biologists are likely even today to look on immunology as imprecise, murky, tricky, and dubious.”3

Now we’ve entered the domain of big pharma, a notoriously fraudulent area of corporate activity. This field of commerce not only nets the highest earnings, its financial gains are so massive, it can afford to pay out record breaking fines and compensations. What’s more the lobbying efforts of pharmaceutical companies outstrip big oil. Pharmaceutical corporations are convicted felons and repeat offenders of the worst kind: they maim and murder without consequence; they simply pay their way out.4 The injuries caused by their products in fact support their industry because they provide therapeutics to treat the harms they themselves have caused. It literally pays them to induce lifelong disease. They sell you a snake oil they know will likely injure you; and then they sell you another snake oil to curtail the harms. And with each so-called medication you take, there are “side-effects.” So long are the lists of side-effects, one would rightly wonder whether the curative side of the product isn’t in fact the true side-effect, while the misleadingly labelled “side-effects” are the main effects of the drug.

Due to the questionable nature of immunology and vaccinology coordinated and funded by big pharma a growing number of MDs have come to question Germ Theory altogether. Quoting Claude Bernard (1813-1878), little known to us because of his holistic approach to medicine, Louis Pasteur conceded upon his death bed, “The microbe is nothing, the terrain [milieu] is everything.” That is to say bacteria and viruses do not cause disease. The environment they live in however can cause them to proliferate in an unhealthy manner. Bacteria outside the human body are part of an ecosystem, and their appearance brings balance to the system as they consume toxins and turn them into usable products in nature. As one author put it: it’s like blaming the firemen for the fire (see Thomas Cowan’s The Contagion Myth). Consequently a literature promoting “Terrain Theory” has been emerging and catching the attention of those who have become aware of the dangers and scams associated with the pharmaceutical industry. Of course big pharma uses its vast resources, including influence of media, medical boards and public health bodies to castigate and deride holistic medicine and its practitioners.

Louis Pasteur Myths

by Asa Boxer

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