Louis Pasteur

Aajonus was consistent and emphatic on the point that Louis Pasteur had no scientific training relevant to disease or human biology. He described Pasteur as a layperson, not a doctor, and as someone who was not a particularly educated man by the standards of professional science. His original fascination, Aajonus explained, was with crystals. Pasteur was drawn into chemistry because he liked to watch crystals grow and to examine the growth patterns of crystals. That was the extent of his scientific formation before he became associated with the question of food spoilage.

Aajonus described Pasteur as having no experience with disease whatsoever, none. He came to the vineyard problem not as a researcher of biology but as someone who happened to apply heat to a fermentation problem and observed a result. In the newsletter writings, Aajonus called him a "crystal observer" and described him as a "non-biochemist, non-medical doctor" to underscore that the man who became the patron saint of germ theory had no legitimate standing to make claims about what caused disease in living organisms.

Aajonus described the specific circumstances that gave Pasteur his first moment of public recognition. A friend of Pasteur's owned a vineyard, and that year there had been heavy rain and unusual heat and moisture, which caused a fungus to get into the crop and rupture the cells of the grapes, effectively destroying the wine. The friend was a middle-class man, not wealthy, and losing the crop would have meant losing some of his land. Pasteur discovered that if he heated the wine, he could stop the mold from completing its process of destruction and the vineyard could still sell the product.

Aajonus was clear that this wine was not good wine. It was low quality, and only the poor drank it because nobody wealthy would purchase it, since it did not taste right. The rich would not touch it. But it saved the vineyard from total financial loss for that year, and that was enough to make Pasteur famous among vineyard owners. Aajonus connected this same logic to beer, noting that Pasteur did the same thing when he cooked some beer and got rid of the yeast that was causing the beer to spoil.

The broader significance Aajonus drew from this was about what Pasteur failed to understand. Pasteur saw the fungus and mold as the problem to be attacked and eliminated. What he did not recognize, Aajonus argued, was that the fungus and mold were present because the crop was already unhealthy. The mold and fungus were symptoms of an unhealthy crop, not causes of it. Rather than looking to enrich the soil so that healthy grapes could grow, Pasteur attacked the visible symptom. He then extrapolated from this into the theory that microbes attack from outside and cause disease, which Aajonus described as a fundamental logical error built on a single commercially motivated observation.

Aajonus framed germ theory not as science but as "speculation, fear and pseudoscience." He acknowledged that germ theory had existed in some form even before Pasteur, noting that a kind of microbial phobia had been part of the medical profession going back to the seventeenth century, and that Pasteur made it more believable by attaching a concrete experimental narrative to it, even if that narrative was drawn from food chemistry rather than medicine. Pasteur gave the existing fear a story that seemed verifiable, and that story was then institutionalized.

Aajonus contrasted Pasteur explicitly with his contemporary Antoine Bechamp, 1816 to 1908, who held the opposite view. Bechamp claimed that disease originates from within the body as a result of the destruction of cellular integrity through toxic food and pollution. Bechamp contended that all microbes were beneficial, some performing cleansing functions, some maintenance, and others regeneration, but that none of them caused disease. Aajonus aligned himself entirely with Bechamp's framework and suggested that society chose Pasteur over Bechamp because it was a warring society that found it easier to identify and battle an invading enemy than to change its lifestyle and diet.

Aajonus returned repeatedly to what he described as Pasteur's dying words, which he treated as the definitive statement on germ theory from the man who had made it famous. According to Aajonus, many reports recorded that among Pasteur's dying words were the following: "Pathogens are not the problem. The environment in which and on which pathogens feed is the problem of disease." In the book we_want_to_live, Aajonus described this as Pasteur realizing that the idea of vaccination was doomed, confessing on his deathbed to his assistants that a poor and toxic environment within the body creates disease, and that microbes do not cause disease.

Aajonus drew a very specific meaning from this retraction. He interpreted it to mean that the cause of disease is the quality of air, food, and all substances with which a person comes into contact, which is the foundational claim of his own primal diet framework. The body's internal environment, its toxicity or health, determines whether disease develops. Microbes respond to that environment; they do not create it.

Why were these dying words ignored and suppressed? Aajonus's answer was direct: philanthropists, people in government, and pharmaceutical houses had already lobbied and funded research to plan and fight a war against germs. Intellectuals and institutions had joined the microbial war and had financial, reputational, and institutional reasons to keep it going. There was no mechanism by which a dying man's retraction could undo that infrastructure. Aajonus also pointed to the Rockefellers and Carnegies as having entered the field in the late 1890s precisely because they saw commercial opportunity in honoring Pasteur's work, regardless of whether it was scientifically sound. He suggested that if Pasteur had spent his life working with people made sick by industrial pollution, he might not have been so easily duped into the framework the medical profession constructed around his observations.

The most damning factual claim Aajonus made about Pasteur was drawn directly from his research at the Sorbonne and was stated multiple times across his workshops and writings with complete consistency. Not one of the animals Pasteur ever injected with a vaccine survived. Every single one died. Aajonus repeated this claim in different sessions, sometimes saying he studied the records at the Sorbonne Institute, sometimes calling it the Salon Institute in Paris, but always arriving at the same conclusion from Pasteur's own laboratory records reviewed with a translator present.

Aajonus explained what happened physiologically. When Pasteur injected diseased tissue into animals, it was not in small quantities; it was massive amounts. The blood of the animal registered this level of disease and concluded that the organism was dying. It was a signal interpreted by the body as a death situation, and the body responded by going into anaphylactic shock and dying. The logic Aajonus applied was that when the body has that kind of toxicity suddenly present, it supposes that it is going to die, and so it does. There is no gradual adaptation, no immune response of the kind the germ theory model predicted. There is simply death.

Aajonus connected this specifically to the biology of herbivores, which were the animals Pasteur used in his experiments. He noted that herbivores do not have the same stomach lining as humans and other animals, and that the kinds of chemical combinations injected directly into the blood bypass whatever digestive protections the stomach might otherwise provide. In his description of what happened when formaldehyde was eventually added to the vaccine mix, Aajonus explained that fewer animals died, because the body went into a different kind of shock from all the chemicals and was distracted from its normal detoxification responses. Flus and colds, which Aajonus understood as the body's natural cleansing processes for dumping mucus and poisons, were also suppressed by this chemical shock.

Despite the fact that not one animal survived, Aajonus noted that roughly twenty years after Pasteur's failures, the vaccine became a commercial product that was sold to the public. He attributed this directly to the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Carnegies deciding to enter the business because they believed it could be made to work commercially, even if the science had not supported it in the laboratory. The strategy, Aajonus argued, was to frighten people into believing they faced deadly disease and that only vaccination could protect them.

Aajonus described the pharmaceutical industry's modern form as growing specifically out of the decision by Rockefeller and Carnegie interests to capitalize on Pasteur's germ theory framework. Not because Pasteur had proven anything that worked in the laboratory, but because the theory provided a commercial model: identify a feared microbe, create a product that claims to neutralize it, and sell that product to a frightened public and a compliant medical system.

He noted that in all of Pasteur's laboratory records, which Aajonus reviewed across multiple visits to Paris over those three years, there was no successful vaccine outcome. Every injection produced death. The pharmaceutical model that followed was built on the theoretical premise rather than on demonstrated laboratory success, and the animals that died in Pasteur's lab were the unacknowledged foundation of an industry that would come to dominate medicine.

Aajonus also noted that when he was heavily researching vaccines through the 1980s and early 1990s, not just at the Sorbonne but through general research, he found that the failure of Pasteur's animal experiments was not widely known. Physicians who believed wholeheartedly in forced immunization seemed to ignore what the original laboratory record showed. They also ignored, Aajonus argued, the fact that everyday people were already naturally exposed to every particle in their environment and were building resistance through that natural daily inoculation, unless they were overdosed or on very poor diets. The logic of artificial inoculation was never necessary given that natural exposure was already doing the work, and doing it without killing the subject.

Aajonus connected Pasteur's legacy directly to what he described as the vaccine epidemic of 1916 to 1918. He stated that sixteen of twenty people who died in that period did so while receiving medical assistance, and specifically that the vaccine was the epidemic. He attributed the deaths not to an influenza virus but to the pharmaceutical intervention itself, which by that point had incorporated formaldehyde and other chemicals into its formula. This was Pasteur's theoretical framework expressed as practical medicine, with lethal results, and Aajonus traced the chain of causation directly back to the original germ theory error.

The deepest conceptual error Aajonus identified in Pasteur's thinking was the confusion between a symptom and a cause. In the vineyard example, the mold appeared because the crop was already compromised. The mold was doing exactly what mold does: it was breaking down and recycling damaged biological material. Pasteur saw the mold and concluded it was the agent of destruction. He did not look further to ask why the crop was vulnerable in the first place, which Aajonus attributed to the poor quality of the soil and the unhealthy condition of the grapes.

This same error, Aajonus argued, was then applied universally to human disease. Bacteria appearing in a sick body were identified as the attackers rather than as janitors responding to already-damaged tissue. The germ theory built an entire medical system on fighting the janitor instead of cleaning the house. The house in Aajonus's framework is the internal environment of the body, and the quality of that environment is determined entirely by what a person eats, breathes, and absorbs. That is precisely what Pasteur acknowledged on his deathbed, and precisely what the pharmaceutical industry could not afford to accept.

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