France's Bogdanoff Twins Die Days Apart

With Metal Hurlant [known in the US as Heavy Metal] also being popular in France at that time, plus the arrival of first role playing games (both US ones and french ones), it was a high time for us, the geeks.

samuelizdat• 5 years ago

Coroners bow to Bogdanoffs, in contact with morticians, possess cadaver-like abilities...

yardie• 5 years ago

They had a sci-fi show in the 80s, Temps X, or Generation X. The title seems fitting in retrospect.

guerby• 5 years ago

TL;DR version not antivax but choose not to vax because feeling healthy at 72.

"die of Covid"

"the brothers had not been vaccinated against Covid-19."

"Their friends said they were convinced their healthy lifestyle would protect them"

"Asked why they had chosen not to have the Covid vaccines if they were not themselves anti-vaxxers, Luc Ferry said on Monday: "Like Igor, Grichka wasn't antivax, he was just antivax for himself. "They were both athletic, with not an inch of fat, and they thought the vaccine was more dangerous than the virus.""

https://www.lamontagne.fr/paris-75000/actualites/covid-19-qu...

From 31 may to 14 november 2021 a total of 2854 unvaccinated people died of COVID19 in France and 2179 died while having at least one shot of vaccine.

About 77% of the population has at least one shot in France.

karlkloss• 5 years ago

I'm not someone who believes in conspiracy theories, but one could come to the conclusion, that this massive campaign against vaccinations, and the general downplaying of the pandemic is a conspiracy to get rid of dumb people.

tehwebguy• 5 years ago

A distinction without a difference.

Majestic121• 5 years ago

It's a pretty contradicting statement to say in the same sentence "I'm not antivax but I think the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus"

It seems like they were actually antivax but did not want the social stigma associated with the term. "I'm not antivax but however yadda yadda"

It reminds me of the classical "Racism is pretty fun because it does not exists, just ask around you'll see nobody is"

adrianN3• 5 years ago

It's a valid opinion that for most people the vaccine is beneficial, but for some people the vaccine is more dangerous than the infection. Usually the plausible example are young children, not people over 70 though.

mikestew• 5 years ago

It reminds me of the classical…

In the U. S., it would have been a sentence ripped right out of the jackass playbook: “I’m not a racist, but…”, <says blatantly racist statement>.

Veen• 5 years ago

It's not an unreasonable opinion where small children with no comorbidities are concerned. Extremely low risk from COVID; tiny but not non-existent risk from the vaccine. It's a different matter when you're in your early 70s though.

xboxnolifes• 5 years ago

It's a pretty contradicting statement to say in the same sentence "I'm not antivax but I think the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus"

In more general terms, outside of covid for a moment, do you think so? If you have been vaccinated for X, Y, and Z, but think the risks of vaccinating for R out weigh the benefits, does that make you antivax?

Shorel• 5 years ago

Yeah, nowadays, many people want to avoid any and all controversy.

One of my friends says he is not vegetarian or vegan, he just doesn't eat meat and tells everyone they should not eat meat.

rajin444• 5 years ago

Do we know why some vaccinated people still die of Covid? That would probably help a lot in figuring out who will benefit from the vaccine.

CodeGlitch• 5 years ago

Because for your body to fight a virus, it needs to have a good working immune system. Some people lack that for various reasons. A vaccine helps in this case but it's not 100%.

Being "fit" certainly helps your immune system. But as we see here, it doesn't make you invincible.

wombat-man3• 5 years ago

"Several friends told them to get themselves vaccinated but they felt because of their lifestyle and their [lack of] comorbidity, they weren't at risk of Covid."

Imagine being over 70 thinking you aren't at risk.

It's really a shame.

Freak_NL3• 5 years ago

There are likely many, many commentors on HN who have family members in that (somewhat open-ended) age bracket who insist that they are not at risk. Either because they don't trust vaccines, or feel perfectly healthy, or feel that 'it is just a flu'.

I do (just the one thankfully, whose 'intuition' tells them that it will be quite alright, despite having frequent contacts with other people), and it's really not great knowing that there is very real risk of seeing them on the ICU at some point.

wombat-man3• 5 years ago

As time went on and the numbers showed that I would probably be fine if I caught it given my age and health. I started to worry a lot less about it. But I still got vaccinated. Can't really relate to this kind of thinking, and I hope your friend remains healthy.

queuebert• 5 years ago

We are we going to start to see being old as a medical condition in and of itself?

dmos62• 5 years ago

Perhaps notably, they died of the coronavirus and had not been vaccinated.

neilwilson• 5 years ago

More notable is actuarial data that shows that all cause mortality remains stubbornly elevated. Actuaries study death for a living and they need to get it right or the life insurance companies they work for go bust.

What the data suggests is that in aggregate we're largely moving death around. From who to whom is the question.

flipbrad• 5 years ago

With a large population of unvaccinated people, and the virus affecting record numbers of people, what did you really expect to happen to all cause mortality??

whimsicalism5• 5 years ago

Excess mortality stats show this to be obviously false

throwaway97345• 5 years ago

"Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64"

That's not the old cohort that typically dies from Covid anymore.

https://www.thecentersquare.com/indiana/indiana-life-insuran...

foo_barrio2• 5 years ago

Isn't excess mortality the aggregate? That was way up in 2020 (in the US at least) no? How is this moving death around?

ramesh31• 5 years ago

He bought?

awrence• 5 years ago

DOOMP EET

boringg2• 5 years ago

Does anyone know if they were liked by the public? I doubt they were much loved in the scientific community based on what I read in the wikipedia entry. Their history seems patchy per wikipedia.

Also I am trying to understand their relevance / importance in the grand scheme. Why is this getting traction?

williamdclt• 5 years ago

I don't know much about them, but everybody I know makes fun of them and considers them to be funny-looking, mostly-inoffensive charlatans.

That's just my social bubble, no idea about the wider public.

peruvian• 5 years ago

They are memes.

rcoilliot2• 5 years ago

French here. Lately they weren't that much loved by the public and mostly mocked because of their weirdness but they were still pretty famous and respected by geeks because of their successful (and pretty influential) show about sci-fi back in the 80s. I guess they were still benifiting from that golden era of them, but the consensus is that they were freaky.

hocuspocus4• 5 years ago

respected by geeks

I don't think that is true at all for "geeks" that witnessed first-hand[1] their manipulative and deceptive attempts at defending their PhDs and scientific papers in early 2000's. After that they doubled down on the intelligent design bullshit, used any opportunity to promote their books (fair enough), while attacking the few journalists that actually tried to expose the fraud.

They should have sticked to sci-fi, but even in their early days they couldn't help but try to vulgarize proper science, even though they weren't really qualified. Good intentions don't make up for peddling pseudoscience, plagiarism, and the constant smoke and mirrors. And it seems they were also facing some pretty serious legal issues in their personal life.

[1] https://forum.hardware.fr/hfr/Discussions/Sciences/topikunik...

BrandoElFollito• 5 years ago

I loved them as a kid but they lost everything when they became fraudsters. Instead of being interesting journalists they wanted to become Great Scientists without the brains for it.

To my children they are just a fascinating case of botched cosmetic surgery

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

They were used in crypto as a sort of bogeyman representation of the old guard financial world keeping down crypto. Locked in mortal combat with Sminem, the representation of the little guy trying to make it in the current world of extreme wealth inequality.

See- https://youtube.com/watch?v=-5OeVSiisLU

smoldesu• 5 years ago

Long before that, they were vilified on 4chan's /biz/ board for being a tongue-in-cheek representation of "old money", so to speak.

marcodiego• 5 years ago

"Aged 72, the brothers had not been vaccinated against Covid-19.

Their friends said they were convinced their healthy lifestyle would protect them and they were admitted to hospital in mid-December."

reacweb4• 5 years ago

I am French, I was interested in the brothers when there was the controversy. Their "phd" was a translation error in their bio. To silence the controversy, they decided to actually pass a phd. Neither brother claimed to be a genius, but while they have many other activities, they passed their phd with work similar to an average student. They deserve their phd.

Their books are generally intended to popularize the scientific work of real researchers. They are well written. Their public appearances on TV are not without humor and self-mockery. They have deserved the sympathy of many french people.

Freak_NL3• 5 years ago

Another commenter posted this link about their academic endeavours:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanoff/

If this summary is correct, they seem to have deserved their PhD in the sense that they managed to bluff their way through it. A bit like getting the gold medal for a marathon as a consolation price when you've managed to do just 10 metres of it (on a unicycle, for reasons unclear to anyone observing).

VHRanger• 5 years ago

Their PhD are absolutely not "work similar to an average [phd] student"

It was utter nonsense, and a quick read of any page in any of the papers supporting their PhD thesis from someone with working knowledge of the area will show it to be word salads.

Others linked to John Baez's analysis of the case, which stands correct 20 years later.

reacweb4• 5 years ago

many student work is also "word salad".

hamiltonians• 5 years ago

dump it!!!

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

At the risk of being flippant, is this any more than "Crazy people die of preventable disease"?

pvaldes• 5 years ago

Their faces had been butchered and begging for attention. Exactly the same that Jocelyn Wildenstein did to herself.

I always think that there must be a component of drug addiction in people that undergoes so much extreme transformations, and still go back for more. Maybe Painkillers applied in those surgeries have something to do with that. Is a trap for rich people affected from personal insecurities

lr1970• 5 years ago

I think that Bogdanoff twins invented a time-machine, traveled to 2021 and used GPT-3 to generate their Ph.D. theses with correct Quantum Field Theory jargon but nonsensical otherwise :-) </joke attempt>

France's Bogdanoff Twins Die Days Apart

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