Apr 29, 2020, 9:11:49 PM
French Nobel Prize Montagnier Accusations against China Refuted
PARIS, April 18 (Nouvelle Solidarité) — Giving credit to the international war party’s insane drive for a confrontation with China, French Prof. Luc Montagnier, the joint recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for co-discovering of the HIV virus, put forward his controversial hypothesis on the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
In an audio interview with a French medical website on April 16, and then during a TV interview with CNEWS on April 17, Montagnier said that after having “delved into every detail of the sequence” of COVID-19, he “discovered” that it has sequences from other viruses, which is HIV, which causes AIDS, and also of malaria. Before Montagnier, a group of Indian researchers supposedly proved that there was an HIV genetic insert. According to Montagnier, only a laboratory manipulation could achieve such an insert. Asked if the virus cannot have taken place within an AIDS victim, Montagnier stressed that “To insert an HIV sequence into the genome you need molecular tools, it is not the patient that does it, but the man in the laboratory.”
Montagnier then arrived at two “logical” deductions: 1) The virus escaped most probably, by accident, from a lab in Wuhan; 2) Chinese researchers were trying to develop a vaccine against HIV. To conclude, Montagnier calls on China to be as courageous as Iran, which after shooting down a Ukrainian commercial jet, acknowledged they did so by error. Today, China should acknowledge the accident, because that would help the world fight the pandemic.
In the U.S., also Fox News on April 15 released a report based on anonymous sources, claiming the novel coronavirus was made in a Wuhan lab. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also wants U.S. inspectors to “inspect” the lab.
In his interview with the City of London’s Financial Times, French President Emmanuel Macron insinuated that some things remained unclear about how the virus appeared in China, a statement overplayed by the media as radically anti-China. However, China’s Global Times reports that “an official at French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said on Friday [April 17]: ‘We would like to make it clear that there is to this day no factual evidence corroborating the information recently circulating in the United States press that establishes a link between the origins of COVID-19 and the work of the laboratory of Wuhan, China.’”
Respecting Montagnier, former colleagues and scientists have come forward very rapidly saying Montagnier’s claims lack any scientific basis. Over the last years, Montagnier has been increasingly criticized in France and elsewhere for drifting towards pseudo-science, and people close to him fear he’s losing it. Already, in 2017, one hundred academicians asked the College of Physicians to sanction him after he expressed “dangerous” positions against vaccinations. And in February, several scientists, in a joint letter published in The Lancet, debunked his narrative claiming the virus has an unnatural origin.
First, the analysis, referenced by Montagnier, by nine “bio-mathematicians” from the India Institute of Technology appeared on Jan. 31 on website bioRxiv, titled “Uncanny Similarity of Unique Inserts in the 2019-nCoV Spike Protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag.” However, once the polemic started, the research article was withdrawn shortly after by its authors. BioRxiv wrote on its page that “these are preliminary reports that have not been peer-reviewed. They should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or be reported in news media as established information.”
Second, Étienne Simon-Lorière, a virologist from Institut Pasteur in Paris, told AFP that the claim about the insert didn’t make sense as there were very small elements found in other coronaviruses too. And some genome pieces looked like genetic material of plants and bacteria! He explained the logic that “If we take a word from a book and it looks like another word, can we say that one has copied from the other? This is absurd!” Respecting Montagnier’s claims that the virus is rapidly mutating, a very large number of top scientists say this is just untrue.
Far more dangerous, Montagnier, without naming it explicitly, accused the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the very lab where the first cases of COVID-19 were identified. Built by French engineers of the Lyon-based Mérieux Institute and partially funded by the U.S. government, the WIV was the first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4, Euronet-P4) laboratory to be built in China.
Anne Goffard, a virologist and professor at the Lille Pharmaceutical Faculty, speaking about the P4 Wuhan lab underlined that “these are outstanding teams of scientists, which have published very high-level scientific contributions. You can’t take them for fools and imagine they are playing wizard in their laboratory.”
Another French scientist, Romain Ligneul, in his blog on the website of Libération, after outlining how P4 labs, boost viruses in order to study them, summarizes three in-depth scientific studies demonstrating conclusively that formal proof that the novel coronavirus came from China just doesn’t exist. Should the virus have escaped from a lab by error, “if this would have been the case, patient zero (who started the epidemic), could as well have been Chinese, French or American.”
In China, once the first cases of atypical pneumonia appeared in Wuhan, the WIV checked its coronavirus collection and found that the virus was 96% identical to that of horseshoe bats living in Southwest China, about a 1,000 km distance from Wuhan. Then, in February, the team of Shi Zhengli of the WIV were the first to identify the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus and upload it to an open access database available to all the scientists of the world.
However — and this might tell us something about the witch-hunt against them — in February, the WIV, after seeing its positive effect in combatting the virus, applied for a patent in China for the use of remdesivir, and experimental drug owned by the American biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. The WIV said it would not exercise its new Chinese patent rights, “if relevant foreign companies intend to contribute to the prevention and control of China’s epidemic.”
Global Times carried an article today, “Hyping of Conspiracy Theories on Virus Origin May Impede Vaccine Development: Experts,” quoting WIV researcher Yuan Zhiming: “For political purposes, some forces have colluded to fan conspiracy theories slandering China’s anti-virus efforts in order to deflect blame, which may complicate China’s vaccine development at the current stage, experts said.” (http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185999.