Nobel prize-winning opponent of COVID-19 vaccines dead at 89

French news outlet France Soir has reported that, “Professor Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine, died peacefully on February 8, 2022, in the presence of his children.” 

Montagnier, who was 89, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). He was a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Director of the Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Research Unit at Aix-Marseille University, Professor Didier Raoult, tweeted,

”We lose a man whose originality, independence and discoveries on RNA allowed the creation of the laboratory which isolated and identified the AIDS virus. This earned him fame, the Nobel Prize, and the incredible hostility of his colleagues. The attention paid to his latest assumptions was disproportionate.”

Staunch opposition to mRNA vaccines

Montagnier’s “latest assumptions,” to which Raoult referred, were the bases of his strong opposition to the mRNA vaccines. 

In a May 2021 video interview with the RAIR Foundation in French, Montagnier attacked the COVID-19 vaccination program:

“It’s an enormous mistake, isn’t it? A scientific error as well as a medical error. It is an unacceptable mistake. The history books will show that, because it is the vaccination that is creating the variants.”

Reverse efficacy

Asked whether we should be vaccinating during a pandemic, Montagnier responded that vaccination makes people more susceptible to severe infection,

“It’s unthinkable … They’re silent … many people know this, epidemiologists know it ... It is the antibodies produced by the virus that enable an infection to become stronger ... It’s what we call Antibody Dependent Enhancement”

Fake quotes

Montagnier quickly found himself, a Nobel prize winning researcher, at the center of attacks - not for what he said but for statements he never made.

Just days after posting its interview of Montagnier, the RAIR Foundation was forced to defend the scientist from these fake attacks, with the following headline:

“ALERT: Luc Montagnier Did NOT Say Vaccine Would Kill People in Two Years - Here's What he DID Say (Video) 

“Vaccine coercion activists are using the fake statement attributed to Prof. Luc Montagnier to discredit his valid scientific observations about the vaccine.”

Fighting mRNA vaccines till his last days

Despite advancing age, Montagnier remained active against the mass COVID vaccination program, addressing an anti-mandate protest rally in Milan less than a month ago, in a video posted on Twitter, with an unwavering declaration in French that was immediately translated to Italian for the crowd:

“The viral protein that was used for messenger RNA in the vaccine is toxic. It is a poison.”

Autism-vaccine connection

This was not Montagnier’s first experience with adversity. In 2012 he came under fire in a Forbes column entitled, “Nobel laureate joins anti-vaccination crowd at Autism One,” when he gave the keynote address at the group’s 2012 conference. 

Crib death

Montagnier again found himself at the center of controversy after giving a joint press conference in 2017 with oncology professor Henri Joyeux, a laureate of the Antoine Lacassagne cancer prize awarded by the National League against Cancer. The two award winning researchers were accused by the Pour Sciences et Avenir journal of using arguments “based on untruths, bias reasoning or misinformation, all against the background of conspiracy theory [to claim] Vaccines may be responsible for sudden infant death.

Pre-COVID censure

Montagnier was eventually the subject of a censure from his colleagues. The Connexion reports,

“Professor Montagnier caused controversy in the scientific community when, one year after winning the Nobel prize, he claimed that “a good immune system” was enough to protect people against AIDS.

“He was also the subject of a public outcry in 2017, when he came out against the French government’s decision to make certain vaccinations mandatory, accusing the policy of “poisoning the next generation little by little”.

“In response, 106 academic scientists wrote an open letter “calling [the professor] to order”. The letter read: “We, academics of medicine, cannot accept that one of our peers is using his Nobel prize [status] to spread dangerous health messages outside of his field of knowledge.”