Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, twin "scientists" whose reputations shrank as their faces grew, are dead of Covid.
The brothers later tried their hands at academic work, writing doctoral theses in mathematics and theoretical physics which were both panned by their peers. Ridiculed by sections of French media, they won a 2014 court case for defamation before losing a lawsuit against the French National Centre for Scientific Research. 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."
Their litigious efforts to silence critics were extraordinary: ill may be spoken of the dead. That said, The Bogdanov Affair, in which their pseudoscientific nonsense was published by reputable scientific journals, showed that the sciences can be punked in the same way that Alan Sokal punked the humanities. Which is something to bear in mind when everyone starts getting in their hits.
