The town hall of Neuilly-sur-Seine, which assured that it had its death certificate, informed AFP on Thursday of the death of the virologist two days before at the American hospital in the city, confirming information from the Liberation newspaper.

But the news of the death of Mr. Montagnier had already been circulating for more than 24 hours on the Internet, relayed by personalities and customary sites of false information, such as that of the online media FranceSoir.

AFP had significant difficulties in obtaining confirmation of this information.

The close family of Mr. Montagnier did not communicate on his death to the main media.

As for the institutions of which he had been a member, such as the Pasteur Institute or the CNRS, they could not be able to verify the announcement.

This situation testifies to the very particular stature of the scientist.

Former star of French research, he had been ostracized from the scientific community for ten years by a series of aberrant positions.

"Today we salute the decisive role of Luc Montagnier in the co-discovery of HIV. A fundamental advance which will unfortunately follow several years of scientific drift that we cannot hide", reacted the association Aides, engaged in the fight against AIDS.

It is indeed for having led the team that isolated the AIDS virus, HIV, that Mr. Montagnier won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008, alongside his collaborator Françoise Barré-Sinoussi but without the third man of this discovery, Jean-Claude Chermann.

Made in the early 1980s, when the AIDS pandemic was exploding with no hope of short-term survival for patients, this discovery was the first step that led some fifteen years later to treatments allowing to live with the disease.

However, she was the subject of a long controversy over her paternity with the team of American researcher Robert Gallo.

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Montagnier and Gallo had finally agreed on the idea that the first had isolated the virus, but that the second had established its direct link with AIDS.

Saluted by Didier Raoult

This controversy heralded many others.

Shortly after obtaining his Nobel Prize, Mr. Montagnier began to defend scientifically discredited theories, such as the so-called "water memory".

The researcher also made many unfounded comments against vaccination, a position that gave him visibility during the Covid-19 crisis, particularly in circles skeptical about the seriousness of the disease or the effectiveness of vaccines. .

Thursday, the first reactions to the death of Mr. Montagnier were in the light of this end of life on the sidelines of the scientific community.

They came mainly from vaccinosceptic figures like the far-right politician Florian Philippot, at the origin of weekly demonstrations against the vaccine pass.

"He was dragged through the mud when he had seen right on the Covid", declared Mr. Philippot on Wednesday on Twitter, denouncing "the strange slowness of the media" to relay the information.

The virologist Didier Raoult, himself widely discredited for his positions in favor of ineffective drug treatments against Covid, praised him on Twitter for the "originality" and "independence" of the researcher

He considered that they had both earned Mr. Montagnier the Nobel Prize and "the incredible hostility of his colleagues", and judged that Mr. Montagnier's final positions had been the subject of careful attention. "disproportionate".

On the government side, the only immediate reaction came from the Minister of Research, Frédérique Vidal, who in a brief press release expressed her "emotion" and offered her condolences to the family of Mr. Montagnier, without mentioning his recent positions. .

© 2022 AFP