A doctrinal canon of the germ theory credits vaccines for the dramatic declines of infectious disease mortalities in North America and Europe during the twentieth century. Anthony Fauci, for example, routinely proclaims that vaccines eliminated mortalities from the infectious diseases of the early twentieth century, saving millions of lives. On July 4, 2021, he commented to NBC’s Chuck Todd, “You know, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it was my responsibility to make sure that we did the science that got us to the vaccines that as we know now have already saved millions and millions of lives.”46 Most Americans accept this claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue. Science actually gives the honor of having vanquished infectious disease mortalities to nutrition and sanitation. A comprehensive study of this foundational assertion published in 2000 in the high-gravitas journal Pediatrics by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists concluded, after reviewing a century of medical data, that “vaccination does not account for the impressive decline in mortality from infectious diseases . . . in the 20th century.”47 As noted earlier, another widely cited study, McKinlay and McKinlay—required reading in virtually every American medical school during the 1970s—found that all medical interventions including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics accounted for less than about 1 percent—and no more than 3.5 percent—of the dramatic mortality declines. The McKinlays presciently warned that profiteers among the medical establishment would seek to claim credit for the mortality declines for vaccines in order to justify government mandates for those pharmaceutical products.48
Seven years earlier, the world’s foremost virologist, Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Edward H. Kass, a founding member and first president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and founding editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, rebuked his virology colleagues for trying to take credit for that dramatic decline, scolding them for allowing the proliferation of “half-truths . . . that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc.—and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors extending life expectancy.”49 Kass recognized that the real heroes of public health were not the medical profession, but rather the engineers who brought us sewage treatment plants, railroads, roads, and highways for transporting food, electric refrigerators, and chlorinated water.50
The illustrations on the following page pose an indomitable challenge to germ theory’s central dogma and stark support for miasma’s approach to medicine. These graphs demonstrate that mortalities for virtually all the great killer diseases, infectious and otherwise, declined with advances in nutrition and sanitation. The most dramatic declines occurred prior to vaccine introduction.
Note the mortality declines occurred in both infectious and noninfectious diseases, irrespective of the availability of vaccines.
“When the tide is receding from the beach it is easy to have the illusion that one can empty the ocean by removing the water with a pail.”
—René Dubos
As Drs. Engelbrecht and K?hnlein observe:
Epidemics rarely occur in affluent societies, because these societies offer conditions (sufficient nutrition, clean drinking water, etc.) which allow many people to keep their immune systems so fit that microbes simply do not have a chance to multiply abnormally.51
(Courtesy of Brian Hooker, PhD)
As a final side note, it seems to me that a mutually respectful science-based, evidence-based marriage incorporating the best of these two clashing dogmas would best serve public health and humankind.
Fauci and Gates; Germ Theory as Foreign Policy
The arcane conflict between germ and miasma theorists has important resonance for public health policy in the developing world, where many policy advocates fiercely protest that a dollar spent on food and clean water is far more effective than a dollar spent on vaccines. As we shall see, the Gates/Fauci militarized approach to medicine has precipitated an apocalyptic battle on the African and Asian continents between the two philosophies in a zero-sum game that pits nutrition and sanitation against vaccines in a life-and-death conflict for resources and legitimacy. The historic clash between these warring philosophies offers a useful framework for understanding Bill Gates’s and Anthony Fauci’s approach to public health. In order to assess the effectiveness of their mass-vaccination projects, we would need a disciplined accounting that compares health outcomes in vaccinated populations to similarly situated unvaccinated cohorts. This is the kind of accounting that neither of these men has been willing to provide. The facts suggest that it is the absence of such reliable metrics and science-based analysis that allows Gates and Fauci to get away with their dubious claims about the efficacy and safety of their prescriptions. Any even-handed examination of the role of immunizations in Africa must acknowledge that mass-vaccination programs may serve a larger agenda in which the priorities of power, wealth, and control can eclipse quaint preoccupations with public health. And, once again, it was the Rockefeller Foundation that pioneered germ theory as a foreign policy tool.
The Triumph of Germ Theory
In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil constituted an “unreasonable monopoly” and splintered the behemoth into thirty-four companies that became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Marathon, and others. Ironically, the breakup increased rather than diminished Rockefeller’s personal wealth. Rockefeller donated an additional $100 million from that windfall to his philanthropic front group, the General Education Board, to cement the streamlining and homogenization of medical schools and hospitals. In accordance with the pharmaceutical paradigm, he simultaneously provided large grants to scientists for identifying the active chemicals in disease-curing plants utilized by the traditional doctors whom he had extirpated. Rockefeller chemists then synthesized and patented petrochemical versions of those molecules. The foundation’s philosophy of “a pill for an ill” shaped how Americans came to view health care.52
In 1913, the patriarch founded the American Cancer Society and incorporated the Rockefeller Foundation. Philanthropic foundations were an innovation of the era, and detractors criticized, as “tax evasion,” Rockefeller’s scheme to take a $56 million deduction on his donation of 72,569 shares of Standard Oil to launch a foundation that would give him perpetual control of that “donated” wealth. A congressional investigation described the foundation as a self-serving artifice posing “a menace to the future political and economic welfare of the nation.”53 Congress repeatedly denied Rockefeller a charter. Attorney General George Wickersham denounced the foundation as a “scheme for perpetuating vast wealth” and “entirely inconsistent with the public interest.”54