In light of the presence in the viral genome of so-called HIV inserts, the late French virologist and discoverer of HIV Luc Montagnier concluded that SARS-CoV-2 must have been created in a lab. He speculated that someone in Wuhan might have been trying to create an HIV vaccine – and, as I have shown in my recent article on ‘The Smoking Gun in Wuhan‘, he was right. Someone was: namely, an associate of the German-Chinese lab in the city who was himself based, however, at none other than the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Montagnier was convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a lab, and he thought, more specifically, that the inventors had inserted sequences of HIV or the AIDS virus into an animal coronavirus, which was supposed to serve as vector for an HIV vaccine. But, in marked contrast to many current proponents of the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis – for whom the virus is nothing less than a ‘bioweapon’ – Montagnier did not think the virus was particularly dangerous or at least that it could remain so for any length of time. Indeed, in Montagnier’s view, SARS-CoV-2 could not remain dangerous for long precisely because of its artificial origins.
As he put it in the April 16th 2020 interview in which he first publicly flagged his suspicions about the origins of the virus, “Nature won’t tolerate just anything”. Referring to the research of his collaborator, the bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, Montagnier said that a kind of natural “harmonisation” of the viral genome was underway and that foreign sequences which had been artificially inserted into it would quite simply be “deleted” as the virus mutated.
“We know a lot of things in molecular biology, we can tinker around,” Montagnier said more fully in his interview with the Pourquoi Docteur? health-news site.
But… nature won’t tolerate just anything. There are harmonisations. … This is to say that nature won’t allow for just any molecular construction. Or if it undergoes them, it tries to eliminate them. … What’s happening is that nature is eliminating these foreign bodies from the genome of the coronavirus. We are witnessing a spectacular number of mutations: what are called ‘deletions’, because precisely the bits that have been altered, the bits of HIV, are removed. Nature is removing them spontaneously as the virus passes from one patient to another.
As proof of his theory, in an interview with France’s CNews news television the next day, Montagnier noted that precisely the region of the genome containing the HIV inserts was mutating more rapidly than the rest and he cited a sample taken from a Covid patient on the West Coast of the USA in which the region had already been “practically destroyed”. (The CNews interview has been preserved here.)
It needs to be stressed that Montagnier was making these observations in mid-April 2020 – not even four months after the official start of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
Although Montagnier – who was a self-styled aficionado of all sorts of unconventional scientific theories and approaches – suggested that it might be possible to eliminate the foreign sequences in the virus using electromagnetic waves, his basic message was that nature was doing the job anyway. “Even if we do nothing,” he told Pourquoi Docteur?, “things will take care of themselves.”
Montagnier did add that this would be “at the cost of many deaths” – seemingly to preserve some interest in his electromagnetic wave theory, which he would then go on to expound. But, in general, his view was that SARS-CoV-2 was highly transmissible but not particularly pathogenic to begin with and that it had already lost much of its virulence by April 2020. (He elaborated upon his view in these terms in an interview with Sud Radio here.)
It is hardly surprising, then, that he would subsequently be a fervent opponent of COVID-19 vaccination, which he described as an “enormous mistake”. But that is another story…
(Translations by the author. The complete audio of the Pourquoi Docteur? interview has been preserved here.)
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack.
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