This Nobel Prize winner fought the HIV epidemic. Here’s what she thinks about COVID-19

When Nobel Prize recipient Françoise Barré-Sinoussi was a young PhD student in the 1970s, she was hopeful she might one day work at a world-renowned biomedical institute in Paris.

But when she met the deputy director and discussed her ambitions, he looked at her and said: “Forget it, just forget it”. “Never a woman has made anything important in science.”

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne this week.Credit: Darrian Traynor

Years later, that same man would call Barré-Sinoussi again to congratulate her on a momentous achievement: discovering the virus that causes AIDS.

“This is funny. Finally, you recognise a woman can do things in science,” she told him.

Aged 35, she had been working at a lab at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, studying the link between cancers and retroviruses, when her mentor Luc Montagnier was approached to see if they would be willing to investigate whether retroviruses were responsible for a devastating new epidemic impacting gay men.

The discovery of HIV in 1983, which Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier were both credited for with a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, led to blood tests to detect the infection and, ultimately, to antiretroviral drugs that began to save lives.

Today, those with HIV who get proper medical care can live long and healthy lives. Scientists keep searching for a way to eradicate the virus, which still causes hundreds of thousands of deaths, mostly in poorer communities.

The French virologist, who is now retired from research, was in Melbourne this week to appear at a series of events and meetings with the Doherty Institute’s inaugural director, Professor Sharon Lewin, whose laboratory focuses on the elusive cure for HIV.

Barré-Sinoussi said the scientific strategy for the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic was very similar, but she was disappointed that more hadn’t been learnt from the HIV response.

“HIV/AIDS for me, it was the first example of where there has been a strong mobilisation of representative patients.

“We did not have that for COVID-19. I think that is a mistake somehow.

“I have been exchanging with politicians, the decision-makers in France, even the president. That says something is wrong. We need to have a representative of civil society in all the committees … if you want the population to accept to be tested, to accept the vaccine.”

She fears the world is not yet prepared for the next pandemic.

“We thought with HIV/AIDS we learnt a lot and that we were better prepared than in the early ’80s. And we found out that human beings had the wonderful capacity to forget, and I’m afraid with COVID-19 it’s exactly the same.”

Two weeks ago, Barré-Sinoussi noticed she was the only one wearing a mask on a bus or metro train in France, even though the country was in the midst of another COVID-19 wave, because it was no longer mandatory.

“I said ‘Do you have to wait for your president to tell you to wear a mask? This is ridiculous’.”

“I said ‘Do you have to wait for your president to tell you to wear a mask? This is ridiculous’.”

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who discovered HIV

“It is one of the reasons I think we are not prepared because the behaviour of people [has] returned to [that of] before the pandemic.”

France has recorded about 155,000 deaths from COVID-19, which peaked at more than 1000 a day in April 2020. The nation has seen about three-and-half times the number of deaths per capita compared to Australia.

Professor Sharon Lewin said the world was more prepared for a pandemic than it was before COVID-19, but it still had “a long way to go”.

Her view is based on the response to monkeypox, a virus similar to smallpox that has had a global resurgence in 2022. Victoria has recorded 70 cases, but as of earlier this month had no active cases. The outbreak has so far largely affected men who have sex with men, with symptoms closely mirroring sexually transmitted infections including syphilis and herpes.

“Diagnostics didn’t roll out quickly in certain parts of the world,” Lewin said of the response to monkeypox. “There was limited access to vaccine. Countries were scrambling and fighting with each other to get vaccines. There were complications in rolling out the vaccine.

“They were all very, very familiar concepts. Imagine if monkeypox had been 1000 times that scale? I don’t think it would have looked any different to COVID.

“So I think in some ways, we are better prepared, but we still need a lot better global solidarity really, and agreements in advance of how data, new diagnostics, new vaccines, new therapeutics are going to be shared equitably around the world.”

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