Laureate of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008, Professor Luc Montagnier has just caused a new earthquake in the scientific community, claiming that SARS-CoV-2 was designed in a laboratory in Wuhan, from the AIDS virus.
Famous French virologist, Luc Montagnier (87) is known for having obtained one of the most recognized distinctions in the scientific world. On October 6, 2008, he was co-winner with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, all rewarded for their work leading to the discovery of the AIDS virus in the 1980s. Then highly respected, and "in the circuit" for more than 40 years, the researcher nevertheless, from the following year (2009), began to attract the wrath of his colleagues.
By stating, first of all, that a strong immune system is enough to prevent a subject from contracting AIDS. A position which, at the time, had appalled many scientists. In 2010, still going against the current, he affirmed his support for the controversial theory of the "memory of water" defended by Jacques Benveniste in the late 1980s. He also defends a microbial origin of autism, and has even proposed in 2002 to cure the Pope's Parkinson's disease with papaya juice.
He made headlines again in November 2017, this time saying he agreed with several anti-vaccine arguments refuted by the medical community, blaming these "preventive remedies to poison little by little all the population that will succeed us" . A hundred academicians of science and medicine then co-signed a forum, considering that the researcher "uses his Nobel Prize to disseminate, outside the field of his competence, messages dangerous to health, in defiance of the ethics that should govern science and medicine" .
On April 16, in an interview on the Why Doctor? website, the Professor once again distinguished himself, this time arguing that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus could not find its originated in the wild animal market in Wuhan, but was made in a laboratoryfrom the AIDS virus .
A thesis summed up the next day on the Cnews set:“ We have come to the conclusion that there has been manipulation of this virus. A part, I do not say the total. there is a model which is the classic virus, coming mainly from the bat, but to which we have added sequences of HIV , he explained. It's not natural, it's the work of a professional, of a molecular biologist, of a sequence watchmaker. What purpose ? I do not know (…). One of my hypotheses is that they wanted to make an AIDS vaccine “.
The researcher, which evokes a real "work of a sorcerer's apprentice “, finally summarizes the conclusions of a study published at the end of January on a prepublication site by researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. This one, much disputed, already evoked "a strange similarity ", which is "unlikely to be fortuitous “, in the amino acid sequences of a protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19, and that of HIV-1, the main cause of AIDS.
But this study, which had been taken up by conspiratorial sites, was later withdrawn by its authors. Indeed, said incriminated amino acid sequences are actually commonplace in many strains (about fifteen, recently listed by the Massive Science scientific community).
"There is too little similarity with the sequence of the HIV virus to conclude that there is a significant exchange of genetic material , summarizes Gaëtan Burgio, geneticist and group leader at the Australian National University, interviewed by Le Monde . This list is all the less significant as the common sequence is short. "If there were real insertions of HIV sequences, the fragments would have been much larger and more specific," adds the researcher. It's more of a coincidence “.
The idea that SARS-CoV-2 could also have been the product of genetic manipulation is also highly dubious. These viruses do exist, but the "human paw", when actually present, is normally very recognizable. However, SARS-CoV-2 does not have the characteristics of an artificial virus. Thus, nothing today allows us to say, or even to suppose, that there would have been human intervention.
"It looks too much like something natural for there to be any doubt that it's something artificial , believes Etienne Simon-Loriere, researcher at the Institut Pasteur. To recreate such a large virus would require technical knowledge that few labs in the world have – probably less than ten – and it seems implausible that scientists could have created a virus that interacts so well with the ACE2 receptor [through which it settles in the human body], whereas this mechanism had never been observed before “.
For the time being, it is therefore still accepted today by the health authorities that the virus responsible for Covid-19 is indeed of animal origin.
Source
