Are vaccines really safe and effective?

We were taught in high school that vaccines have saved millions of lives in America and Europe. One of the greatest heroes of modern medicine is Louis Pasteur, the creator of the “germ theory,” the ideological foundation for vaccines. But the real history of vaccines, and the real story of Louis Pasteur, is something quite different.

In his early career, Pasteur did believe that germs were the cause of disease. But 15 years before his death he recanted this belief. He came to believe that it was not germs but the degradation of an organism’s internal environment that causes disease. He …read more