On September 4, a prim-looking woman in her early 50s addressed a crowd in the main courtyard of the Louvre Palace in Paris. She called on protesters to stand up against state-mandated pandemic measures, including the "pass sanitaire," introduced by President Emmanuel Macron’s government on July 21 and compulsory to resume many aspects of daily life in France, such as using public transport and eating in restaurants. 

“We have let down old people. We didn’t smile at our newborns because women gave birth wearing masks,” she exclaimed. “This is the society that we don’t want anymore. We want to re-establish human connection.” 

Until 2018, when she stepped down for personal reasons, Alexandra Henrion-Caude had enjoyed a successful career as a geneticist at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. She was already known to be a conservative Roman Catholic, with links to groups that oppose gay marriage, but during the coronavirus crisis, has emerged as an influential figure within the country’s anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine movements, telling her 60,000 Twitter followers that the mRNA technology used in some coronavirus vaccines can modify human DNA and railing against Covid-19 restrictions. 

Henrion-Caude is just one of a significant number of prominent French medical professionals with such views. France exhibited high levels of resistance to vaccines long before the coronavirus ripped through the world. According to a June 2019 study, conducted by Gallup World Poll for the medical charity Wellcome, one in three French people believed all vaccines to be unsafe. That same year, the virologist Luc Montagnier — winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine, in honor of his discovery of the HIV virus — made public statements linking childhood immunizations to instances of sudden infant death syndrome.