No, it's rooted in solid evidence that Mike Stone has provided. I'll quote some of this evidence below:
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Did Pasteur and Koch provide the necessary scientific evidence required in order to confirm the germ hypothesis? What does it take to accept or reject a hypothesis? How does a hypothesis go on to become a scientific theory? In the first of a two-part examination of the germ hypothesis looking at the work of both men, we will begin by inspecting two of Pasteur's early attempts to prove his hypothesis in the cases of chicken cholera and rabies. We will investigate how he arrived at his germ hypothesis, and then look to see if his experimental evidence reflected anything that could be witnessed in nature. In doing so, we will find out whether or not Louis Pasteur was ever able to validate and confirm his germ hypothesis.
[snip]
According to French-American microbiologist
Rene Dubos, the “central dogma of the germ theory is that each particular type of fermentation or of disease is caused by specific a kind of microbe.” While the idea that disease could be caused by invisible germs had been around since Girolamo Fracastoro published
De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis in 1546, French chemist Louis Pasteur conjured up his own germ hypothesis in the early 1860s based upon his work on fermentation. Granted, Pasteur had largely plagiarized from the work of French chemist and physician Antoine Bechamp, which he subsequently misinterpreted as Bechamp saw the microbes, which he referred to as microzymas, performing a necessary and vital function by breaking down substances and tissues in order to carry away dead cells and other waste products. In other words, germs are nature's clean-up crew and are not the cause of disease. As he noted in
The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element, Bechamp viewed these processes as being born within all living things based upon the internal environment of the individual:
“The bacteridiae were
not the cause of the diseased condition, but were one of its effects; proceeding from the morbid microzymas they were capable of inducing this diseased condition in the animal
whose microzymas were in a condition to receive it. Hence it is seen that the alteration of natural animal matters is spontaneous, and justifies the old aphorism so concisely expressed by Pidoux:
“Diseases are born of us and in us.”
“On the other hand, the disregard of this law of nature, the firm establishment whereof is completed by the present work,
necessarily led M. Pasteur to deny the truth of the aphorism, and to imagine a pathogenic panspermy, as he had before conceived, a priori, that there was a panspermy of fermentations. That M. Pasteur after having been a sponteparist should reach such a conclusion was natural enough; he was neither physiologist nor physician,
but only a chemist without any knowledge of comparative science.”
Pasteur, on the other hand, viewed the germs, such as yeasts involved in the fermentation of sugar to produce alcohol as well as other microbes responsible for putrefaction and the decay of tissues, as outside invaders. He proclaimed that the microbes, isolated from wounds and other degenerative tissues, were the cause of the destruction of the normal tissues, leading to disease. His views ran contrary to the
popular notion at the time that microbes were the result of, and not the cause of, disease. Pasteur,
along with a minority of other scientists, believed that diseases arose from the activities of these microorganisms, while opponents such as Bechamp and German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, believed that diseases arose from an imbalance in the internal state of the afflicted individual. As noted by Bechamp, just as Pasteur had assumed that there was a specific microbe for each ferment, he did the same by assuming that this must hold true for human and animal diseases as well.
However, there was a bit of a problem for the germ hypothesis as Pasteur was unable to ever observe any germ “infecting” anyone in order to cause disease. The only natural phenomenon that he could observe were the signs and symptoms of disease, and he tried to correlate a tentative relationship between microbes and disease based upon finding microbes in wounds and diseased tissues. As we know, correlation does not equal causation. The fact that microbes are found on the body of a decaying animal does not mean that the microbes caused the animal to die. The microbes occur after the fact in order to perform a necessary function, in this case decomposition. Rather than concluding that the microbes were present in wounds
due to the need to heal the injury, Pasteur assumed that the microbes, which he claimed were present all around us within the air, became attracted to the wounds, taking advantage of the weakened state. With this a priori assumption in mind, Pasteur set out to create evidence to support his preconceived idea.
Testing the Germ Hypothesis
Chicken Cholera
While Pasteur had this idea of how diseases were caused by microorganisms as early as the 1860s, he didn't put his hypothesis to the test
until the late 1870s. In an 1878 lecture
The Germ Theory And Its Applications To Medicine And Surgery read before the French Academy of Sciences on April 29th, 1878, Pasteur had already hypothesized that there was a “virus” (i.e. some form of chemical poison as the word didn't mean an obligate intracellular parasite at that time) in the solutions of the bacterial cultures that he was working with. He then went on to claim that this poison would accumulate within the body of the animal as the bacteria grew. Interestingly, he then noted that his hypothesis presupposes the forming and necessary existence of the bacteria, thus admitting that his hypothesis was not based upon any observed natural phenomenon.
“There is only one possible hypothesis as to
the existence of a virus in solution, and that is that such a substance, which was present in our experiment in nonfatal amounts,
should be continuously furnished by the vibrio itself, during its growth in the body of the living animal. But it is of little importance since
the hypothesis supposes the forming and necessary existence of the vibrio.”
Regardless, Pasteur's attempts to prove his germ hypothesis began later that same year with his study into the fowl disease known as chicken cholera. According to Gerald Geison's The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, in December of 1878, Pasteur was supplied some blood from a diseased chicken by Henri Toussaint, a French veterinarian who claimed to have cultured the responsible bacterium. However, another version states that Toussaint sent the heart of a guinea pig inoculated with the presumed germ of chicken cholera to Pasteur. Whatever the case, Pasteur immediately attempted isolating the microbe in a state of “purity” in order to demonstrate that it was the sole cause of chicken cholera. Upon doing so, he realized that the microbe developed more easily in neutral chicken broth than in the neutral urine that Toussaint utilized as his culture medium. While Pasteur thanked Toussaint, Geison noted that he “left little doubt that he considered Toussaint's work and techniques decidedly inferior to his own.” Pasteur eventually claimed that he could make successive cultures of what he referred to as the “virus” (i.e. poison) always in a state of “purity” in a medium of chicken broth from diseased chickens. He would then use this to inoculate healthy chickens and cause disease.
In his 1880 paper Sur les maladies virulentes et en particulier sur la maladie appelée vulgairement, Pasteur laid out his hypothesis on how he felt that the disease spreads. After unsuccessful attempts to make guinea pigs sick utilizing the cultured “organism,” he assumed that guinea pigs could become “infected” but were essentially “immune” besides the formation of abscesses. He assumed that the pus in abscesses left after injection contained the microbe responsible for the disease in a “pure state.” Pasteur then hypothesized that these pustules would burst open and spill the bacterial contents onto the food of the chicken and rabbits, contaminating them and causing disease.
[snip]
Thus, from Pasteur's first attempt to prove his germ hypothesis:
- The experiment did not reflect his hypothesis as to how the disease spreads.
- The agent utilized may have been nothing more than normal coagulated fibrin.
- The route of exposure of feeding chickens diseased muscles and/or injecting the blood of diseased chickens into healthy ones was not a natural exposure route.
- The act of injecting coagulated fibrin into a healthy animal can cause disease.
- The vaccine, used as proof of his success in identifying the causative agent, was ineffective and unsuccessful despite claims stating otherwise.
- Pasteur fabricated the account of how the attenuated vaccine came to be created.
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Full article:
Pasteur's Problems
substack.com
I find it interesting that originally, virus meant poison, as I think it is indeed poisons in the body that account for a lot of what biological viruses are purported to do.
mikestone.substack.com
drsambailey.com
