• Controversy: Could the Covid-19 pandemic arise due to an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan? The theory supported by some experts

The theory of the French professor Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus (HIV), according to which the new coronavirus would be the result of a laboratory accident, has been strongly contested this Friday by the scientific community.

According to the Nobel Prize for Medicine, accustomed to controversy and already highly controversial in the scientific world, the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be the result of an attempt to make a vaccine against the AIDS virus.

As evidence, according to him, the presence of elements of HIV in the genome of the new virus , and even of elements of the "malaria virus", as argued in an interview on the websites frequencemedicale and pourquoidocteur .

According to Montagnier, who has also made his controversial statements on CNews, the characteristics of the new coronavirus cannot have emerged naturally . The scientist adds that the accident would have occurred in the high security laboratory in Wuhan (China), the 'ground zero' of the pandemic.

"Has no sense"

Montagnier's statements have been quickly answered by the scientific community. "It doesn't make sense. They are small elements that we find in other viruses of the same family, from other coronaviruses in nature," virologist Etienne Simon-Lorière, from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told AFP.

"They are fragments of the genome that actually resemble many sequences of the genetic material of bacteria, viruses and plants," he adds. "If we take a word from a book and that word resembles that of another book, can we say that one has copied the other? It is aberrant, " adds this specialist, responsible for the evolutionary genomic structure of RNA viruses at the Institute. Pasteur.

The theory that the virus was born from genetic manipulations has been around for a long time and has already been debunked by analyzes of the virus's genome as reported by Chinese scientists, especially since researchers around the world have been able to later isolate and analyze themselves. the virus from samples from patients from their own countries.

A controversial path

Montagnier, who worked at the Pasteur Institute, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for identifying the virus responsible for AIDS (HIV), along with his then colleague, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.

Other of his previous theories - on electromagnetic waves emitted by DNA, on the benefits of papaya ... - have already been ridiculed by his colleagues. In 2017, he aligned himself with Henri Joyeux, a leading figure in anti- vaccines, and has also denounced the danger of vaccines and compulsory vaccination, considering that we risk "with good will to start, little by little poisoning the entire population "

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • Wuhan
  • China
  • Coronavirus
  • Covid 19

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