Rabies

“ . . . there is no way to be sure that even the bites of a certifiably rabid animal will lead to rabies in the victim. . . . The mortality rate of ‘declared’ or symptomatic rabies is effectively 100 percent, but the threat of death from the bites of a rabid animal is vastly less. . . . Pasteur himself estimated that only 15 to 20 percent of people bitten by rabid dogs would eventually die of rabies if they would not or could not submit to his treatment. . . . There is simply no way to be sure that the rabies vaccine is even potentially beneficial to the vaccinated individual. In this crucial respect, Pasteur’s ‘treatment’ was unlike ordinary therapeutic measures, undertaken for the immediate sake of a person already suffering from a disease. When he vaccinated asymptomatic victims of animal bites, Pasteur was subjecting them to a painful and inherently risky series of injections even as he knew that many and probably most of them would escape the disease anyhow” (Geison, 230).