He claims that the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic is the result of an “industrial accident” from a Chinese laboratory. What credit can we give to Professor Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 but on whom the scientific community takes a very critical look? Portrait of a researcher judged as a marginal.
- Professor Montagnier claims that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory
- Part of the scientific community considers this researcher, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008, to be a marginal
Luc Montagnier has reached his Everest. In 2008, he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine. A consecration of its role in work which led a few years earlier to the identification of a formidable killer, HIV at the origin of the AIDS epidemic. But the virologist biologist is not alone on the highest step of the podium: he must share his precious reward with his colleague at the Institut Pasteur, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. And both have a co-winner in the person of the German Harald Zur Hausen who identified the papillomavirus responsible for cervical cancer. As if total recognition was refused to Professor Montagnier.
The distrust of the scientific community
Considered a marginal, he has not yet finished with the distrust of part of the scientific community. The doubts that some have expressed about his real participation in the discovery of HIV echo the challenge to the theory he defended in the 2000s on the electrical waves that would be emitted by DNA. Ditto when, at the end of this same decade, he explains that an immune system reinforced by a healthy lifestyle can be protected … from AIDS. Luc Montagnier is no more followed by many of his peers when he tries to credit the principle of the “memory of water” defended by Jacques Benveniste, whose work has been harshly judged by the scientific community.
Director of a research institute in Shanghai
It takes more to shake Professor Montagnier. It was even he who went on the attack in 2010, denouncing the “climate of intellectual terror” which, according to him, reigns in France. And he slams the door in his own way by taking the direction of a research institute in Shanghai, China.
But in November 2017, here he is again at the heart of a controversy which this time earned him the opprobrium of his companions from the Academy of Sciences and Medicine: he is alongside Professor Henri Joyeux who denounces the dangerousness of vaccines. “We want to warn about good intentions at the start but which risk poisoning the whole population little by little”, he defends himself. Alas, if he narrowly escapes exclusion, he cannot avoid the verbal sentence of the Academy which accuses him of conveying “a message dangerous to health”.
Adventurous positions
Today, while the whole world is stunned by a pandemic that is generating many questions, Professor Luc Montagnier comes with a revelation about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus: a pathogen resulting from genetic manipulation in a laboratory in Wuhan where researchers have tried to use a coronavirus to develop a vaccine against AIDS.
A theory that has been circulating mezzo voce since the start of the epidemic, very quickly denied by analyzes of the genome of this virus, the data of which the Chinese immediately communicated. A suspicious speed of reaction in the eyes of the Professor who wanted to take a closer look.
The formation, the titles, the very career of Luc Montagnier incite not to throw away this track before it is clarified, dug… or proven. But his ideas or his sometimes adventurous positions leave a lot of room for questions about what this stone thrown into the pool of multiple unknowns that surrounds a virus responsible for a pandemic already dramatic, historic and so disturbing is really worth. . Including for men of science.
Below, the interview of Professor Luc Montagnier by Dr Jean-François Lemoine:
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