While Louis Pasteur’s germ theory functions as one of the foundational concepts of modern medicine, resistance to COVID-19 prevention measures reveal a rejection not just of government mandates, but of germ theory as well. Therefore, this article seeks to trace the rhetorical linear of rejections of germ theory denialism through an examination of primary and secondary texts from Pasteur’s contemporaries, through the development of chiropractic, and into the COVID-19 pandemic. The author finds that the denial of viruses offers a peculiar form of biorhetoric that invokes absence and invisibility, rather than presence, as rhetorical grounds for rejecting public health directives.

A current rise in so-called “caveman” diets, books, exercise regimes and other trends demonstrates a cultural attempt to reclaim idealized prehistoric conditions for the modern human. In a rhetorical analysis of texts from this modern paleo culture, we identify what we call a “paleomyth” and illustrate how such lifestyle trends not only offer truncated understandings of evolutionary science, but more importantly how they offer a mythological narrative for paleo believers.