France’s most popular twins, who became popular for hosting a TV science and science-fiction show in the 1980s on a spaceship set have died of covid six days apart.
The Bogdanoff brothers were synonymous for years with popular science and were celebrities in France during their lifetime.
They died of coronavirus within days of each other in a hospital with one dying on 28 December, 2021 while his brother died on Monday, January 3, 2022
Aged 72, the brothers had not been vaccinated against Covid-19 because they were convinced their healthy lifestyle would protect them but in Mid- December they were admitted to hospital.
Family friend Pierre-Jean Chalençon said they had left the illness to last too long in their bodies before seeking hospital treatment, deciding it was similar to flu.
“People have said they were anti-vaxxers but they absolutely weren’t,” he told BFMTV.
“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.”
According to Le Monde, The Bogdanoff brothers were icons from a kitsch period of culture as their programme on TF1 which ran for years was seen in some ways as highlighting cutting-edge technology, but when the TV channel went private in 1987, they were dropped.
During the 1990s their facial features changed dramatically, leaving them with odd-looking chins, lips and cheek-bones with some people saying they looked like aliens.
“We are proud of having faces like extra-terrestrials,” they once said.
Grichka Bogdanoff denied surgery claims saying that they never had “what people call cosmetic surgery”, insisting that he and his brother were experimental by nature and had tried out very advanced technology.
But by their friend, former education minister Luc Ferry, said they had both had Botox injections.
The brothers later started academic work, writing doctoral theses in mathematics and theoretical physics .
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, January 3: “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.”