Good ole Louis Pasteur's legacy here.... He created the germ theory, which some sources say he recanted on his death bed!!!!
Of course, the genie was already out of the bottle and definitely wasn't about to be stuffed back in there! As I understand it, Pasteur had relationships with pharmaceutical companies in England etc and they promoted his ideas and ran with them, so his admiting that he was wrong years later wasn't about to de-rail a runaway profit machine...