All episodes of The Michael Shermer Show

The Michael Shermer Show · 2026-03-12 · 63 min · 11,201 words

Heretics: The Scientists Who Were Mocked But Later Proven Right

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The biographer of Pasteur says we have to understand the high pressure environment of French academia. There's on top of it, he did human testing with his rabies vaccine, and when people died, he buried it along with the people. The people died, and he didn't want to mention that his rabies vaccine hadn't worked because that would lose him money. So He hid that.

And it I mean in academia, you have to report when you do something wrong so other people don't kill people too, right? We had a vaccine in record time, under a year, and that never been accomplished before. From that perspective, defeating COVID was an extraordinary thing. We were also extraordinarily lucky because the mRNA technique that had been developed that the COVID vaccine largely depended upon came from Katikariko, who had been demoted fired, threatened with deportation by the Department of State, because no one saw a future in the research she was doing.

And I mean we were really really lucky she's not of the sort who went, you know what, screw all of this. I want to go be a florist. We see it with Ignaz Semelweiss and we see it with Joseph Lister, though I discuss in the book, both of whom talked about bacterial infection in medicine and were just vigorously attacked. Semmel Weiss was destroyed for it.

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