An "incredible" discovery. This is how is presented the very media intervention of Professor Luc Montagnier in a podcast published by the site Pourquoidocteur.fr, this Thursday. According to this scientist, now retired but recognized by a Nobel Prize in medicine in 2008, the Covid-19 disease virus is of human origin. It would have been created in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan: a hypothesis demonstrated, according to Professor Montagnier, by several established facts.
But these words repeated this Friday on the air of Cnews challenge, even bristle, several members of the scientific community joined by us.
Links between the Covid-19 virus and the AIDS virus?
Based on a study published by "his" mathematician Jean-Claude Pérez, who "delved into the smallest details of the sequence" of the virus, Professor Montagnier argues that SARS-CoV-2 contains "sequences of a another virus which is HIV, the AIDS virus ”. He adds that a "group of Indian researchers tried to publish an analysis" of the same type and that it was withdrawn "under enormous pressure".
But "the study of Indian bio mathematicians was quickly overturned by other work which, by looking into the computer study of the genome, proved that there was no HIV sequence", in reality ensures Anne Goffard, virologist and teacher at the Faculty of Pharmacy in Lille. The study in question was also withdrawn by the authors themselves after "comments received from the research community on their technical approach and their interpretation of the results", can we read on the site BioRxiv, host of the publication.
Concerning the mathematical study provided by Jean-Claude Pérez, Étienne Decroly, CNRS researcher at the Architecture laboratory develops an analogy: “The sequence of a virus corresponds to 30 pages of a book. We scientists have tools to try to determine if a paragraph from this book has ever existed in another book. We have the sequences of all known viruses available. As for similarities with HIV, it is as if the word hat appeared four times in two different books. We can, by chance, have sequences that look alike without demonstrating intentional modifications ”.
A human creation?
According to Professor Montagnier, the supposed links between the Covid-19 and HIV viruses prove one thing: the current coronavirus is a creation emanating from a laboratory. When contacted, Jean-Claude Pérez wanted to be assertive: “This is the work of a watchmaker's precision. The presence of pieces of HIV cannot be natural ”.
According to Professor Montagnier, the creation was even made in the laboratory of Wuhan, from which the pandemic started. If it exists, the journal Nature evoked in 2017 its very secure installation, by reporting that after the study of a virus transmitted by ticks, Chinese researchers could then be interested in those responsible for SARS and Ebola . But nothing about HIV.
And even if work on HIV would have been carried out there, underlines the virologist Anne Goffard, "they are excellent teams of researchers, who have published articles of very high level. We must not take them for idiots and imagine that they are playing sorcerer's apprentices in their laboratories ”.
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"Molecular engineering exists," explains researcher Étienne Decroly. We are particularly interested in knowing why viruses are dangerous for a species. We can thus try to insert precise sequences to create virulence factors. But when we look at SARS-CoV-2, nothing proves the existence of intentionally added sequences, and we find traces of natural evolution throughout the genome ”.
"Encouraging changes"?
The octogenarian also evokes, with regard to Covid-19, "spectacular mutations" because, he assures, nature would remove itself "foreign bodies from the genome of the coronavirus" - or here, the HIV sequence that would have been added - "as the virus passes from one patient to another". This assertion makes virologist Anne Goffard jump. "We observe, contrary to what he says, that the virus has changed very little since its appearance, as we expected," says the coronavirus specialist, who relies on the pooling of work researchers from many countries.
All of them have sequenced the form of genome that appeared in their respective countries (France, Italy, China, United States, etc.) and the results of these databases are final. "Covid-19 mutates much less than can mutate HIV, for example, because coronaviruses have the distinction of having an enzyme that corrects errors that can occur during replication," says Anne Goffard. “We can see that everything is going as expected for this type of virus. There are mutations that appear, but nothing leads to demonstrate a particular selection of more virulent strains ”, specifies Étienne Decroly, CNRS researcher at the AFMB laboratory.
What is Professor Montagnier's credibility today?
These are not, on the contrary, the first baseless, even tinged words of conspiracy, made by the Nobel Prize in medicine. Even before his consecration in 2008, Professor Montagnier, in bulk, supported the controversial theory of the "memory of water", which would like water to keep the properties of substances with which it has been in contact , recommended to Pope John Paul II to cure speech problems with fermented papaya (with benefits never proven) or, more recently proposed to treat autism with antibiotics. In 2009, this globally recognized specialist in HIV had declared that certain good immune systems could "get rid of the virus in a few weeks" adding that "the not very balanced diet" of the African populations could explain their contamination. The content of his remarks had been invalidated by the researcher Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who had discovered the AIDS virus with him in 1983.
Another feat of arms of this close friend of Professor Henri Joyeux, a fierce opponent of vaccines: in 2017, Luc Montagnier estimated, without evidence, that there existed with certain vaccines a risk “of gradually poisoning the entire population " The indignation came this time from 106 academics of science and medicine. "We cannot accept that one of our colleagues uses his Nobel Prize to disseminate, outside the field of his competence, messages dangerous for health", they wrote in a tribune. Nothing to startle Luc Montagnier, who proclaimed to Le Monde in 2018: "The Nobel Prize gave me my freedom of thought, and I use it, but my theories are based on scientific facts". A final statement to which the French scientists we interviewed do not seem to subscribe today.