Luc Montagnier, a Nobel Prize winner in Medicine in 2008, for his role in discovering HIV 25-years earlier, has died.
An online media FranceSoir confirmed that the death of French virologist Luc Montagnier was announced in the town hall of Neuilly on Thursday. He died Tuesday at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, at the age of 89.
He was known for having discovered in 1983, with other scientists, the HIV virus, the origin of the disease AIDS . In 2008, he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this discovery.
Luc Montagnier was Criticized by his peers for several years
This scientist had, however, been decried by his peers in the 2000s for some of his theories.
In an American documentary in 2009, for example, he defended the idea that a good immune system makes it possible to get rid of HIV “in a few weeks”. He had also proposed to cure Pope John Paul II, ill with Parkinson’s, with fermented papaya or to treat autistic disorders, of bacterial origin according to him, with antibiotics.
In 2017 a hundred members of the Academies of Science and Medicine condemned the position of the virologist on the supposed risks of vaccines.
“We, academicians of science and/or academicians of medicine, cannot accept from one of our colleagues that he uses his Nobel Prize to disseminate, outside the field of his competence, messages dangerous to health, in defiance of the ethics which must preside over science and medicine”, they write, as reported then Ouest France.
During the Covid crisis, he had also opposed vaccination . He also claimed in April 2020 that SARS-Cov-2 was made on the basis of HIV, which has never been scientifically substantiated.