Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates met with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday in Pakistan to acknowledge the country’s progress against polio.

During the trip, his first to Pakistan, Gates also stressed the need to curb virus transmissions in neighboring Afghanistan and preserve global gains.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where wild polio virus continues to paralyze children, although not a single infection has been reported in Pakistan for more than a year.

Gates told reporters in Islamabad at the end of his visit that the South Asian nation, where the disease crippled approximately 20,000 Pakistani children a year in the early 1990s, has an opportunity to eliminate polio.

“We’re not done, but we’re certainly in by far the best situation we have ever been in. We’ve never had a year without zero cases,” he said.

But Gates cautioned that the polio virus was detected as recently as December in sewage samples in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan, stressing the need for Pakistan to keep up the momentum and stay vigilant.

“I think that the steps taken in Pakistan during 2022 will probably set us up to finish polio eradication,” Gates said while speaking alongside Faisal Sultan, the special assistant to Khan on health affairs.

Gates co-chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative project between governments and international organizations.

In a televised ceremony, Pakistani President Arif Alvi conferred the Hilal-e-Pakistan, the country’s second-highest civilian award, on Gates for his work to fight poverty and diseases, including polio.

Gates and Sultan said polio transmissions in Afghanistan continue to pose a challenge to Pakistan’s eradication program and global gains against the disease. Gates noted, however, that Afghan vaccination rates have gone up in recent months after dropping off for more than three years.

“There is more vaccination taking place in Afghanistan now than for the last three years. … But it’s still not as high as it should be, and so there’s work to be done in terms of understanding how we support them,” Gates said when asked for his comments on the eradication efforts since the Taliban takeover of the country in August.

The United Nations says that in November and December 2021, health workers were able to deliver polio vaccinations to 2.6 million Afghan children who had been inaccessible since 2018 because of the conflict.

Sultan said Pakistan was closely working with Taliban authorities to stem polio transmissions through a joint effort on both sides of their common border.

Afghan authorities reported four cases of wild polio in 2021, down from 56 cases a year before.

“We have directly engaged with them and have ongoing conversations to make sure that a synchronized campaign for eradication of polio can continue because we look at our two countries adjacent to each other as, epidemiologically speaking, tightly linked to the eradication of polio,” Sultan explained.
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Experts from nine countries are planning to collect and combine aquatic animal sounds for a global library. Scientists in Australia believe an undersea chorus of mammals, fish and some invertebrates will help them gauge the health of marine ecosystems.

Songs by bearded seals and the “boing” of a minke whale are part of a global collection being put together for the first time by a team of international researchers.

The samples are stored in the individual libraries of various institutions, but never before have they been curated in a single collection.

All marine mammals, including the humpback whale, are thought to emit sounds, along with many fish and invertebrates. A new data bank aims to use these recordings to measure biodiversity and the health of ecosystems.

Miles Parsons, a researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the lead author of a report on the databank, says animal sounds can indicate the health of an ecosystem.

“When you are talking about things like soundscapes, there is a lot of work recently that has been done to tease out the acoustic characteristics of a soundscape to be able to identify the type of habitat that it is and even start to look at the quality of the habitat. There has been some work recently where they have looked at the difference between degraded coral reefs and healthy coral reefs and the differences in the soundscapes that you have between those. There’s lots of different applications that you can get from this, from passive acoustic monitoring.”

The mulloway is one of the loudest fish in the world. Of the 34,000 known species of fish, only 1,000 have had their sounds documented.

Researchers use highly sophisticated ocean hydrophones, or underwater microphones, to record sounds. Amateur divers have used underwater cameras to record the squeaks and groans of marine life, and they submit their findings to academics.

And some birds reportedly make underwater noises.

Scientists believe that pollution and warming temperatures are changing underwater acoustics.

The research paper “Sounding the Call for a Global Library of Biological Underwater Sounds” was published in the journal “Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.”

It is a collaboration between experts from various countries, including Britain, China, New Zealand and the United States.
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NASA celebrates an anniversary on the Martian surface while a space-travel startup tumbles back to Earth. Russia helps refuel the International Space Station, and how a recent volcanic eruption could lead to faster tsunami warnings in the future. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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After two years, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be taking a toll on Americans’ mental health, with a growing number of people suffering from a wide array of issues, from anxiety to depression. Lesia Bakalets has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
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A study released Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that infants are less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 if their mothers are vaccinated during their pregnancy.

The study found that babies whose mothers received two doses of an mRNA vaccine while pregnant were about 60% less likely to be hospitalized for the virus during their first six months of life. The odds are strengthened if the mother is vaccinated after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.  

The agency has urged all women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning to get pregnant to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, which it says increases the risk of a variety of complications, including premature birth and stillbirth.

The CDC researchers based their conclusions from monitoring 379 infants who had been hospitalized at 20 pediatric hospitals across the U.S. between last July and January of this year, including 176 who tested positive for COVID-19.

In another vaccine-related development, Britain’s Health Security Agency says the results of several studies suggests a COVID-19 vaccine reduces the chances of someone suffering from the lingering effects of a COVID-19 infection, a condition commonly known as “long COVID,” according to The Guardian newspaper.

The agency came to its conclusion after examining data from 15 studies conducted at home and abroad, half of which looked at whether the vaccine could protect someone from developing long COVID if they had not been infected, with the others focusing on the effect of vaccination among people who were already suffering from long COVID.

The HSA researchers found that those who have received one or two doses of a vaccine are less likely to develop long COVID symptoms, such as fatigue, headaches, hair loss, shortness of breath or loss of smell, compared with those who are unvaccinated. The review also said there was evidence that unvaccinated people suffering from long COVID had fewer or reduced symptoms once they were vaccinated, compared to those who remained unvaccinated.

Meanwhile, South Korea says its daily number of new COVID-19 cases has risen above 90,000 for the first time Wednesday. The 90,443 new infections reported by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency was a dramatic increase from the 57,164 new cases from Tuesday.

Despite the increasing number of new cases driven by the highly-contagious omicron variant, Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum said the government may soon ease current coronavirus restrictions, including lifting a 9 p.m. curfew on restaurants, cafes and bars, and ending the cap on the number of people allowed for private gatherings at six.

In the United States, the administration of President Joe Biden has told key lawmakers that it needs an additional $30 billion to fund its COVID-19 response efforts.

The extra spending requested by President Biden comes nearly a year after passage of the massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan aimed at helping the U.S. economy recover from the pandemic. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that while the administration continues to have “sufficient funds” to respond to the current omicron-driven surge, “our goal has always been to ensure that we are well prepared to stay ahead of the virus.”

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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A U.S. government report warns that sea levels along America’s coasts will rise about an average of 30.5 centimeters over the next 30 years, about equal to water level increases recorded in the past 100 years.

The report released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and six other federal agencies predicted the Gulf Coast, especially Texas and Louisiana, will get hit hardest. The Atlantic coast will also see higher than average sea level rise, while it will be less on the Pacific coast, the report said.

Scientists say the higher sea levels are the result of climate change and will spark more coastal floods on sunny days when it isn’t storming.

The study’s lead author, William Sweet, an oceanographer for NOAA’s National Ocean Service, said the worst of the long-term effects of the sea level increases from melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland probably won’t begin to be felt until after 2100.

U.S. cities such as Annapolis, Maryland; Miami Beach, Florida; and Norfolk, Virginia, already get a few minor floods a year during high tides, but the researchers said that by 2050, those will be replaced by several “moderate” yearly floods that cause property damage.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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Pollution by states and companies is contributing to more deaths globally than COVID-19, a U.N. environmental report published on Tuesday said, calling for “immediate and ambitious action” to ban some toxic chemicals.

The report said pollution from pesticides, plastics and electronic waste is causing widespread human rights violations and at least 9 million premature deaths a year, and that the issue is largely being overlooked.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused close to 5.9 million deaths, according to data aggregator Worldometer.

“Current approaches to managing the risks posed by pollution and toxic substances are clearly failing, resulting in widespread violations of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” the report’s author, U.N. Special Rapporteur David Boyd, concluded.

“I think we have an ethical and now a legal obligation to do better by these people,” he told Reuters later in an interview.

Due to be presented next month to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which has declared a clean environment a human right, the document was posted on the Council’s website on Tuesday.

It urges a ban on polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl, man-made substances used in household products such as non-stick cookware that have been linked to cancer and dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily.

It also seeks the clean-up of polluted sites and, in extreme cases, the possible relocations of affected communities – many of them poor, marginalized and indigenous – from so-called “sacrifice zones”.

That term, originally used to describe nuclear test zones, was expanded in the report to include any heavily contaminated site or place rendered uninhabitable by climate change.

“What I hope to do by telling these stories of sacrifice zones is to really put a human face on these otherwise inexplicable, incomprehensible statistics (of pollution death tolls),” Boyd said.

Boyd considers the report, his latest in a series, to be his most hard-hitting yet and told Reuters he expects “push back” when he presents it to the Council in Geneva.

U.N. rights chief Michelle Bachelet has called environmental threats the biggest global rights challenge, and a growing number of climate and environmental justice cases are invoking human rights with success.

Chemical waste is set to be part of negotiations at a U.N. environment conference in Nairobi, Kenya, starting on Feb. 28, including a proposal to establish a devoted panel, similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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A billionaire who led an all-private space crew into orbit last year has announced plans for up to three new missions in conjunction with SpaceX, including one with a spacewalk.

Jared Isaacman, who founded payment processing company Shift4, will lead the first of the new flights with a launch potentially coming by the end of this year. 

In addition to a mission featuring the first spacewalk attempted by non-professional astronauts, the planned flight also includes achieving a record altitude in Earth orbit.

As part of the partnership with SpaceX, the flights are set to utilize SpaceX spacecrafts.

Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters. 
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The COVID-19 infection rate for Africa may be as much as seven times higher than reported, while death counts could be two to three times higher, according to the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa.

“We’re very much aware that our surveillance systems problems that we had on the continent, with access to testing supplies, for example,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti said Thursday, “have led to an underestimation of the cases.”

Public health officials have warned for some time that Africa’s COVID infection and death tolls were likely undercounted.

India’s health ministry reported 58,077 new COVID cases on Friday. Like Africa, public health officials have also cautioned that India’s COVID figures are probably under-calculated, as well.

As many as 3,000 New York City municipal workers are facing termination Friday if they do not adhere to the city’s mandate requiring city workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Workers have staged protests, but Mayor Eric Adams has remained firm in upholding the policy imposed by his predecessor Bill de Blasio.

“We are not firing them. People are quitting,” Adams said recently.

Firefighters and police could be among those terminated.

Meanwhile, officials in Paris and Brussels have warned that they will not allow convoys, to enter the cities to stage anti-vaccine protests, similar to the one in Ottawa, Canada. Part of the French convoy is already en route to the capital for the weekend rally.  The Belgian protest is planned for Feb. 14.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday it has recorded more than 406 million global COVID infections and almost 6 million deaths. More than 10 billion COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, the center said.  
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Trucker-led protests against coronavirus restrictions in Canada shut down another U.S. border crossing Thursday, as copycat movements gathered steam overseas and Washington called on its northern neighbor to use federal powers to end the blockades.

The border obstructions have already impacted business, with the key Ambassador Bridge linking Ontario and Detroit out of service for several days — and major automakers forced to cut back production at several plants as a result.

A second crossing in the western province of Alberta has been blocked for days, and on Thursday protesters closed down a third — in central Manitoba.

Citing supply shortages, Ford said it was forced to slow down production at factories in Canada, while some Stellantis factories in the United States and Canada halted work Wednesday evening, General Motors canceled several shifts, and Toyota said its plants were also hit.

In the Canadian capital, police said Thursday they were bringing in reinforcements, issuing more arrests and tickets, and stepping up truck towing operations in a bid to break the impasse that has paralyzed the city.

But protesters were hunkering down and taking pride in how their two-week protest has mushroomed into an international movement.

“You know it’s really bad if Canadians are coming out full force,” said protester Naomi Gilman, noting how her fellow citizens had largely remained quiet “for two long years” of COVID-19 restrictions.

“So I think that resonates around the world for sure,” she told AFP.

France, New Zealand, US

Addressing reporters outside the House of Commons, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once again called the blockades “unacceptable” and said he was working with authorities across the country to bring them to an end.

“This is hurting communities across the country,” Trudeau said.

Washington stepped up its pressure too, with the White House saying that U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas “called his Canadian counterparts, urging them to use federal powers to resolve this situation at our joint border.”

Despite Trudeau and Washington warning the protests pose an economic threat, rallies inspired by the trucker movement have sprung up elsewhere, from New Zealand to France and Belgium.

An anti-vaccine protest turned ugly Thursday in Wellington, with police clashing with demonstrators on the grounds of parliament and more than 120 people arrested.

In France, thousands inspired by the Canadian truckers planned to converge Friday evening on Paris, with some aiming to move onwards to Brussels.

Paris police sought to prevent the demonstration, saying they would ban so-called “Freedom Convoys” and would stop roads from being blocked, threatening hefty fines or jail — while Belgian authorities vowed similar action.

And in the United States, supporters took to social media announcing a “People’s Convoy” of truckers and “all freedom-loving Americans” to gather east of Los Angeles for a two-day rally beginning March 4 before hitting the road, possibly towards the capital Washington.

Canada’s self-styled “Freedom Convoy” began last month in the country’s west — launched in anger at requirements that truckers either be vaccinated, or test and isolate, when crossing the U.S.-Canada border.

For two weeks they have occupied the capital, Ottawa, with loud protests marked by music, honking and banner waving.

They have caused significant economic disruption by shutting down the Ambassador suspension bridge — a trade corridor used daily by more than 40,000 commuters and tourists, and trucks carrying $323 million worth of goods on average.

Even Trudeau’s political rival, Tory party interim leader Candice Bergen, who earlier expressed support for the protesters, urged them Thursday to end their siege.

“I believe the time has come for you to take down the barricades, stop the disruptive action, and come together,” she said from the House of Commons.

‘Canadian pride’

With blockades dragging on, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer joined a chorus of industry voices warning of the economic impact — saying it was “imperative” that Canadian officials rapidly de-escalate the situation.

Presumably eager to stop the movement spreading further domestically, several provinces including Alberta, Quebec and Saskatchewan this week announced a gradual lifting or loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.

A court has already ordered the truckers to stop the incessant honking that has upset residents in Ottawa and made sleep difficult.

But the atmosphere on the streets of the capital remained one of defiance and celebration. Some 400 vehicles remain camped on Parliament Hill below Trudeau’s offices, against a backdrop of barbecues, campfires and music.

Dennis Elgie, a curling ice technician who came from Toronto to join the protest, called the movement “fantastic.”

“I’ve never seen Canadian pride like this,” he told AFP. “This is history.” 

  

 
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Facing growing pressure from impatient state governors, the Biden administration acknowledged for the first time that it is developing plans to guide the country away from the pandemic’s emergency phase toward a more relaxed national response, including ending the federal recommendation for wearing masks in most indoor settings.

“We are internally discussing, of course, what it looks like to be in the phase of the fight against the COVID pandemic where it is not disrupting everyone’s daily lives,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday. “We recognize people are tired of the pandemic. They’re tired of wearing masks.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently recommends “universal indoor masking,” including in businesses and schools, “regardless of vaccination status and regardless of what states require.”

While some states follow the CDC guidance, pandemic health protocols have always varied by state with different requirements for masks, vaccines and testing.

Now more states are relaxing coronavirus health protocols, including New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Rhode Island and Washington. The rule changes, implemented by both Republican and Democratic governors, include lifting indoor mask requirements in certain settings, such as schools and businesses, as well as rescinding vaccine mandates.

Psaki insisted that while administration officials understand the need to be flexible, they are following the advice of medical experts who rely on scientific evidence.

“That doesn’t move at the speed of politics; it moves at the speed of data,” she said.

The CDC said it is working on new guidance.

“We are working on following the trends for the moment,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday.

Democrats joining Republicans

In the first two years of the pandemic, Democrats were more in favor of strict public health restrictions while Republicans largely rejected them.

But now, with vaccination rates higher than 70% in some states and polls showing public pandemic fatigue, Democratic governors and state officials are also relaxing measures to avoid a backlash.

“Public health is made up of two words. The health part we focus on a lot of science and the data, but we need to understand the public part as well,” Dr. Anand Parekh, chief medical adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said to VOA.

Over the past week, an average of more than 227,000 new coronavirus cases has been reported each day in the United States, a decrease of 63% from the national pandemic peak of more than 806,000 cases in mid-January, according to data tracked by The New York Times. Hospitalizations are also declining significantly across the country.

“For the next few weeks, we should see a decrease in epidemic activity. All of the indicators seem to go down,” Alessandro Vespignani said to VOA. Vespignani is the director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University and leads a team of infectious-disease modelers who have been developing COVID-19 projections since the pandemic began.

Governors are seeing this trend, recognizing that their citizens are weary, and in the absence of CDC guidance, taking steps to relax restrictions.

“The CDC and the administration are trying to play catch-up to that reality,” Parekh said, underscoring that the federal response must focus not only on the moment but what it would look like a month from now.

“We see time and time again, federal agencies being late. We saw that with respect to omicron and testing just a couple of months ago,” he said.

Many public health experts are still advising caution.

The downward trend needs to be sustained over a period of several weeks and reduced even further before the nation can transition from pandemic to endemic response, said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of medicine in the Infectious Diseases Division at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

“Endemic is where we kind of have a truce with the virus,” Schaffner said, and the strain on the health care system will be “substantially diminished.”

“At the moment I stand with the CDC,” Schaffner told VOA. “Let’s keep wearing our masks. Let’s allow the cases to really come down. Let’s do this for another month or two, to be absolutely sure, not only that we’re heading down but that we’ll stay down.”

Vespignani added, “We could see bumps in the road due to omicron-2, a mutated version of the omicron variant that has begun to circulate in some places.”

He said the easing of mitigations should be done in a way that makes sure we keep facilitating the quick decreasing trends in infections.

“It is more and more important to increase the number of vaccinated and boosted individuals,” he said. “This is the wall that we want to be as high as possible to protect us in case of any future wave of the pandemic.”

A recent Monmouth University poll found that 70% of Americans surveyed agree with the sentiment that “it’s time we accept that COVID is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.”

“Americans’ worries about COVID haven’t gone away. It seems more to be a realization that we are not going to get this virus under control in a way that we thought was possible just last year,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Just 52% supported face mask and distancing guidelines in their home state, down from a peak of 63% last September during the delta variant surge, the Monmouth poll found.

Countries changing restrictions

Some other countries are making similar moves. Spain and Italy – two European countries with high vaccination rates, declining infection numbers and lower hospitalization figures, are loosening measures this week to coexist with the coronavirus.

England, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and several Nordic countries, including Denmark and Sweden, have also taken steps to end or relax their restrictions.

China, meanwhile, is maintaining its most stringent protocols. During the Winter Olympics, Beijing is keeping its “zero-COVID” policy of testing, mass lockdowns and strict social restrictions as authorities worry about the ability of the Chinese health care system to cope and adapt to new strains.

Besides China, India, Canada, Germany, Angola and Indonesia are some of the countries with the strictest government COVID policies, according to the Government Stringency Index put together by researchers at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.

Nine metrics are used to calculate this index – school closures, workplace closures, cancellation of public events, restrictions on public gatherings, closures of public transport, stay-at-home requirements, public information campaigns, restrictions on internal movements and international travel controls.

While some European leaders have said that COVID-19 should be treated as an endemic, like influenza, the World Health Organization says that’s premature.

“We are now starting to see a very worrying increase in deaths, in most regions of the world,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in remarks to media earlier this month.

“It’s premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory,” he said.

American public health experts said the debate in the U.S. to lift restrictions must take into account the steps being taken to prevent new variants.

“Only 10% of people in low-income countries around the world have been vaccinated,” Parekh said. “Until we can vaccinate the rest of the world, the threat of variants and the threat to the United States will still be there.”

Vanderbilt’s Schaffner said helping countries vaccinate their population is necessary not only for humanitarian reasons, but also self-interest.

“Those variants can come from abroad and be here in no time,” he said.

The U.S. remains the largest donor of vaccines. At least 414 million doses of vaccines have been shipped, about 34% of the 1.3 billion doses pledged by the administration. 
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French researcher Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV and more recently spread false claims about the coronavirus, has died at age 89, local government officials in France said. 

Montagnier died Tuesday at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a western suburb of the capital, the area’s city hall said. No other details were released. 

Montagnier, a virologist, led the team that in 1983 identified the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, leading him to share the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine with colleague Francoise Barré-Sinoussi.

The French minister for higher education and research, Frédérique Vidal, praised Montagnier’s work on HIV in a written statement Thursday and expressed her condolences to his family.

Inspired by discoveries

Montagnier was born in 1932 in the village of Chabris in central France.

According to his autobiography on the Nobel Prize website, Montagnier studied medicine in Poitiers and Paris. He said recent scientific discoveries in 1957 inspired him to become a virologist in the rapidly advancing field of molecular biology.

He joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1960 and became head of the Pasteur Institute’s virology department in 1972.

“My involvement in AIDS began in 1982, when the information circulated that a transmissible agent — possibly a virus — could be at the origin of this new, mysterious disease,” Montagnier said in his autobiography.

In 1983, a working group led by him and Barré-Sinoussi at the Pasteur Institute isolated the virus that would later become known as HIV and was able to explain how it caused AIDS.

American scientist Robert Gallo claimed to have found the same virus at almost exactly the same time, sparking a disagreement over who should get the credit. The United States and France settled a dispute over the patent for an AIDS test in 1987. Montagnier was later credited as the discoverer of the virus, Gallo as the creator of the first test.

Shunned for recent views

Since the end of the 2000s, Montagnier started expressing views devoid of a scientific basis. His opinions led him to be shunned by much of the international scientific community.

As COVID-19 spread across the globe and conspiracy theories flourished, Montagnier was among those behind some of the misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus.

During a 2020 interview with French news broadcaster CNews, he claimed that the coronavirus did not originate in nature and had been manipulated. Experts who have looked at the genome sequence of the virus have said Montagnier’s statement was incorrect.

At the time, AP made multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact Montagnier.

Last year, he claimed in a French documentary that COVID-19 vaccines led to the creation of coronavirus variants.

Experts contacted by The Associated Press explained that variants found across the globe began emerging long before vaccines were widely available. They said the evidence suggests new variants evolved as a result of prolonged viral infections in the population and not vaccines, which are designed to prevent such infections.

Earlier this year, Montagnier delivered a speech at a protest against vaccine certificates in Milan, Italy.

Montagnier was emeritus professor at the Pasteur Institute and emeritus research director at the CNRS. He received multiple awards, including France’s highest decoration, the Legion of Honor.
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