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French Nobel laureate professor Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV, claimed that the new Coronavirus was created within a laboratory and mentioned that the deadly virus, which has infected more than 2.5 million people worldwide, originated during the attempt to make a vaccine for AIDS virus and was accidentally released.
But on Friday, France said there was no evidence of a link between SARS-CoV-2 and the work of China’s P4 research laboratory in Wuhan, rejecting the claim made by the Nobel laureate, who made the recent comments during a podcast by Pourquoi Docteur and also in a television interview.
Wuhan coronavirus research laboratory
As reported, in an interview with French CNews, Montagnier said that the new Coronavirus is the result of an attempt to develop a vaccine against the AIDS virus because there were some elements of HIV present in the genome of the new virus. The French scientist’s claim that the virus originated in Wuhan’s laboratory echoed a similar accusation by the US. USA In the last days. United States President Donald Trump said Wednesday that his government was trying to determine whether the Coronavirus emanated from Wuhan’s laboratory or not.
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Later, an official from the office of the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, said:
We want to make it clear that to this day there is no objective evidence to corroborate recently circulated information in the United States press that establishes a link between the origins of COVID-19 and the work of the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China.
France and China relationship
It is worth mentioning that in 2004 France, which has registered more than 150,000 cases of infection and more than 19,000 deaths from COVID-19 so far, had signed an agreement with China to establish a research laboratory for infectious biosafety level 4 diseases, which is the highest level, in the Chinese city of Wuhan, according to a French decree signed by the then Chancellor Michel Barnier.
Recently, French President Emmanuel Macron raised questions about China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and said things happened in the country that “we don’t know.” But none of the officials openly supported the controversial comments about the source of the virus in Wuhan’s lab.
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The controversy surrounding the Wuhan laboratory
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading medical expert in the United States, said at a White House press conference on Friday that the current evidence on the origin of the deadly virus is “entirely consistent with the leap of one species from an animal to a human”.
Previously, an official with the World Health Organization (WHO) denied that the virus was produced in a laboratory or as a biological weapon. Richard Brennan, regional director of emergencies for the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, said at a press conference in Egypt in February that “It is (novel coronavirus) a class of viruses that are primarily what we call zoonotics, which come from of the animal kingdom. “
Recent comments made Montagnier draw criticism from other scientists. According to AFP, a virologist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, Etienne Simon-Loriere, said that the claims about the origin of the virus made no sense since very small elements were also found in other Coronaviruses. “If we take a word from a book and it looks like another word, can we say that one has copied from the other?” asked the virologist.
