Hong Kong scientist Dr. Li-Meng Yan was stepping into uncharted territory.

Hours before she boarded an April 28 Cathay Pacific flight to the United States, the respected doctor who specialized in virology and immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health had plotted her escape, packing her bag and sneaking past the censors and video cameras on campus.

She had her passport and her purse and was about to leave all of her loved ones behind. If she was caught, she knew she could be thrown in jail -- or, worse, rendered one of the "disappeared."

Yan told Fox News in an exclusive interview that she believes the Chinese government knew about the novel coronavirus well before it claimed it did. She says her supervisors, renowned as some of the top experts in the field, also ignored research she was doing at the onset of the pandemic that she believes could have saved lives.

She adds that they likely had an obligation to tell the world, given their status as a World Health Organization reference laboratory specializing in influenza viruses and pandemics, especially as the virus began spreading in the early days of 2020.

Yan, now in hiding, claims the government in the country where she was born is trying to shred her reputation and accuses government goons of choreographing a cyber-attack against her in hopes of keeping her quiet.

Yan believes her life is in danger. She fears she can never go back to her home and lives with the hard truth that she’ll likely never see her friends or family there again.

Still, she says, the risk is worth it.

"The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of COVID," she told Fox News from an undisclosed location.

She added that if she tried to tell her story in China, she "will be disappeared and killed."

Yan's story weaves an extraordinary claim about cover-ups at the highest levels of government and seemingly exposes the obsessive compulsion of President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party to control the coronavirus narrative: what China knew, when it knew it and what edited information it peddled to the rest of the world.

Yan, who says she was one of the first scientists in the world to study the novel coronavirus, was allegedly asked by her supervisor at the University/WHO reference lab, Dr. Leo Poon, in 2019 to look into the odd cluster of SARS-like cases coming out of mainland China at the end of December 2019.

"The China government refused to let overseas experts, including ones in Hong Kong, do research in China," she said. "So I turned to my friends to get more information.

Yan had an extensive network of professional contacts in various medical facilities in mainland China, having grown up and completed much of her studies there. She says that is the precise reason she was asked to conduct this kind of research, especially at a time when she says her team knew they weren’t getting the whole truth from the government.

One friend, a scientist at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China, had first-hand knowledge of the cases and purportedly told Yan on Dec. 31 about human-to-human transmission well before China or the WHO admitted such spread was possible.

She reported some of these early findings back to her boss, Yan said.

"He just nodded," she recalled, and told her to keep working.

A few days later, on Jan. 9, 2020, the WHO put out a statement: "According to Chinese authorities, the virus in question can cause severe illness in some patients and does not transmit readily between people... There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported cluster.”

Yan said she and her colleagues across China discussed the peculiar virus but that she soon noted a sharp shift in tone.

Doctors and researchers who had been openly discussing the virus suddenly clammed up. Those from the city of Wuhan--which later would become the hub of the outbreak--went silent and others were warned not to ask them details.

The doctors said, ominously, "We can't talk about it, but we need to wear masks,'" Yan said.

Then the numbers of human-to-human transmission began to grow exponentially, according to her sources, and Yan started digging for answers.

"There are many, many patients who don't get treatment on time and diagnosis on time," Yan said. "Hospital doctors are scared, but they cannot talk. CDC staff are scared."

She said she reported her findings to her supervisor again on Jan. 16 but that's when he allegedly told her "to keep silent, and be careful."

"As he warned me before, 'Don't touch the red line,'" Yan said referring to the government. "We will get in trouble and we'll be disappeared."She also claims the co-director of a WHO-affiliated lab, Professor Malik Peiris, knew but didn't do anything about it.

Peiris also did not respond to requests for comment. The WHO website lists Peiris as an "adviser" on the WHO International Health Regulations Emergency Committee for Pneumonia due to the Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV.

Yan was frustrated, but not surprised.

"I already know that would happen because I know the corruption among this kind of international organization like the WHO to China government, and to China Communist Party," she said. "So basically... I accept it but I don't want this misleading information to spread to the world."

WHO admits China did not self-report its coronavirus outbreakVideo

The WHO and China have vehemently denied claims of a coronavirus cover-up.

The WHO has also denied that Yan, Poon or Peiris ever worked directly for the organization.

"Professor Malik Peiris is an infectious disease expert who has been on WHO missions and expert groups - as are many people eminent in their fields," WHO spokeswoman Margaret Ann Harris said in an email. "That does not make him a WHO staff member, nor does he represent WHO."

Yan says despite any pushback, she has been emboldened by a sense of right and wrong and says she had to speak up despite the personal and professional consequences.

"I know how they treat whistleblowers," [ Dr. Li-Meng Yan] said.

Like so many before her, once Yan decided to speak out against China, she discovered her life was apparently in jeopardy, as well as that of those closest to her.

It was a fear directly relayed to her and seemingly confirmed by U.S.-based Hong Kong blogger Lu Deh, she says.

After she shared some of her theories and suspicions with him, he told her she would need to relocate, perhaps to the United States, where she wouldn't have to constantly look over her shoulder. Only then would she be safe and have a platform to speak, he said.

Yan made the decision to leave, but things got complicated when her husband of six years, who also worked at her lab, discovered the telephone call between his wife and the blogger.

Yan told Fox News she begged her husband to go with her, and says while her spouse, a reputable scientist himself, had initially been supportive of her research, he suddenly had a change of heart.

"He was totally pissed off," [Dr. Li-Meng Yan] said. "He blamed me, tried to ruin my confidence... He said they will kill all of us.'"

Shocked and hurt, Yan made the decision to leave without him.

She got her ticket to the U.S. on April 27. She was on a flight the next day.

When she landed at Los Angeles International Airport after her 13-hour journey, she was stopped by customs officials.

Fear gripped her and Yan didn't know if she would end up in jail or be sent back to China.

"I had to tell them the truth," she said. "I'm doing the right thing. So I tell them that 'don't let me go back to China. I'm the one who came to tell the truth here of COVID-19... And please protect me. If not, the China government will kill me."

The FBI was allegedly called in to investigate. Yan claims they interviewed her for hours, took her cell phone as evidence and allowed her to continue to her destination.

The FBI told Fox News it could neither confirm nor deny Yan's claims; however, Fox News was shown an evidence receipt that appeared to confirm an interaction

As Yan was trying to find her footing in America, she says her friends and family back home were being put through the wringer.

Yan claims the government swarmed her hometown of Qingdao and that agents ripped apart her tiny apartment and questioned her parents. When she contacted her mother and father, they pleaded with her to come home, told her she didn't know what she was talking about and begged her to give up the fight.

The University of Hong Kong took down her page and apparently revoked access to her online portals and emails, despite the fact that she says she was on an approved annual leave. In a statement to Fox News, a school spokesperson said Yan is not currently an employee.

"Dr Li-Meng Yan is no longer a staff member of the University," the statement read. "Out of respect for our current and former employees, we don’t disclose personal information about her. Your understanding is appreciated."

The Chinese Embassy in the United States told Fox News they don't know who Yan is and maintain China has handled the pandemic heroically.

"We have never heard of this person," the emailed statement read. "The Chinese government has responded swiftly and effectively to COVID-19 since its outbreak. All its efforts have been clearly documented in the white paper "Fighting COVID-19: China in Action" with full transparency. Facts tell all."

The WHO has also continued to deny any wrongdoing during the earliest days of the virus. The medical arm of the United Nations has been taken to task recently by scientists challenging its official view of how the virus spreads. The WHO has also altered the coronavirus timeline on its website, now saying it got information about the virus from WHO scientists and not the Beijing authorities--as it has claimed for more than six months.

Fox News has also reached out to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the scientists Yan accuses of suppressing her concerns for comment.

Yan says she'll continue to speak out--but knows there's a target on her back.

A Hong Kong virologist has revealed that she was looking into the CCP virus back in December 2019, and was allegedly told by a Chinese official about the virus’ risk of human-to-human transmission on Dec. 31—well before this was publicly confirmed by the regime and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Dr. Yan Li-Meng, in an interview with Fox News published on July 10, said she was told by her supervisor at Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health to study the SARS-like virus coming out of the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last December. Unable to obtain information from Chinese authorities, Yan said she turned to a friend, a scientist at the Chinese regime’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention who had first-hand knowledge of the outbreak.

The friend told her that the disease could spread between humans on Dec. 31. The regime officially reported the outbreak that day, but did not confirm human-to-human transmission until Jan. 21 after weeks of initially claiming there was little or no evidence of this occurring.

Yan fled to the United States in April and has sought asylum, fearing punishment if she were to return to Hong Kong.

“The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of COVID,” Yan told Fox News.

The scientist’s claims add to mounting evidence showing that Beijing was aware of the severity of the initial outbreak and covered it up. By the time it acknowledged human-to-human transmission and locked down Wuhan, five million residents had left the city, seeding the virus across China and around the world.

Yan said when she reported her findings of the outbreak’s severity to her supervisor in mid-January, she was told “to keep silent, and be careful.”

“As he warned me before, ‘don’t touch the red line,’” Yan told Fox News. “We will get in trouble and we'll be disappeared.”

Numerous leaked internal documents obtained by The Epoch Times reveal that authorities have consistently underreported the number of CCP virus cases in various regions across China, even as fresh outbreaks emerged in recent months in northeastern China and the country’s capital Beijing.

The WHO, which has repeatedly praised the regime for its “transparency” amid the pandemic, recently corrected its official account of how it was informed of China’s initial outbreak. Previously, the body’s official timeline said Chinese health authorities notified it of the disease on Dec. 31, but this was changed to say that its office in China “picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website” on cases of so-called viral pneumonia in the Chinese city.

Last week, the United States filed a notice to officially withdraw from the WHO over its role in aiding the regime’s coverup of the pandemic. The United Nations body has started the process of investigating the origins of the outbreak.

Dr Yan Limeng was a post-doctoral fellow at HKU. She has left the University.

While HKU respects freedom of expression, Dr Yan’s past or present opinions and views do not represent those of the University.

HKU notes that the content of the said news report does not accord with the key facts as we understand them. Specifically, Dr Yan never conducted any research on human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus at HKU during December 2019 and January 2020, her central assertion of the said interview.

We further observe that what she might have emphasised in the reported interview has no scientific basis but resembles hearsay.

HKU does not act on hearsay and we will not further comment on this matter.

Yan exclusively told Fox News Digital last week that she believes the Chinese government knew about the novel coronavirus well before acknowledging the outbreak publicly. She also claimed her supervisors, renowned as some of the top experts in the field, ignored research she was doing at the onset of the pandemic that she believes could have saved lives.

"I have to hide because I know how they treat whistleblowers, and as a whistleblower here I want to tell the truth of COVID-19 and the origin of the SARS-2 COVID virus," Yan told Fox News Digital.

She told Hemmer that Beijing government knew in December that more than 40 citizens had already been infected with the virus and "human-to-human transmissions [were] already [occurring] at that time."

An intelligence dossier compiled by the Five Eyes intelligence agenices that was leaked to an Australian newspaper in May stated that Chinese authorities denied that the virus could be spread between humans until Jan. 20, "despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December." As late as Jan. 14, the World Health Organization had stated that there was "no clear evidence" for human-to-human transmission of COVID-19.

"I know how they treat whistleblowers," she said. "[They want] To keep people silent if they want to reveal the truth, not only about COVID-19, but also for the other things happening in China. For example, during the SARS [pandemic of 2003], senior doctor Professor Jiang Yanyong had revealed evidence [of a cover-up] in Beijing ... and also in Shanghai [another physician's] team reviewed the sequence of the SARS-COVID-2 [coronavirus] for the first time in the world and published it in February this year and then their lab was shut down by the government.

"I am waiting to tell all the things I know, provide all the evidence to the U.S. Government," Yan added. "And I want them to understand, and I also want the U.S. people to understand how terrible this is. It is not what you have seen ... This is something very different. We have to chase the true evidence and get the real evidence because this is a key part to stop this pandemic. We don't have much time."

• Mr. Jekielek:
  • • Since the outbreak began, over 18 million people have contracted coronavirus. The global economy is facing the worst crisis since the Great Depression. And statistics say over 700,000 people have died.
    • But was all of this preventable?
    • Dr. Yan Limeng says that in December 2019 she was told by her supervisor at the Hong Kong School of Public Health to investigate the mysterious virus that had emerged in Wuhan, China.
    • So what did she uncover? And what was the cost of speaking out?
    • This is American Thought Leaders ??, and I’m Jan Jekielek.
    • Dr. Limeng Yan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
• Dr. Limeng Yan: Thank you, Jan. Thank you for your invitation.
• Mr. Jekielek: I feel very honored actually to be able to talk to you today. You came out of Hong Kong with an incredible story to tell a little while ago. We know some of it. Some of it has been all over the U.S. on television and so forth. We’re going to do a bit of a deeper dive today.
• Dr. Yan: Sure.
• Mr. Jekielek: But before we do that, I want to find out from you about the national security law just recently passed in Hong Kong. I’m sure you’ve been thinking about that.
• Dr. Yan: Of course. Actually, because I’ve been in mainland China for almost 30 years, [I know] that national security law actually just applies what they have already done in mainland China to Hong Kong and to the other countries related to the CCP’s culture. So we can simply understand it like this. What can be done in Hong Kong has already been done in China.
• Mr. Jekielek: So with this national security law, because you were working at the university in Hong Kong, the lab in Hong Kong, would that have changed anything in terms of what you were able to do?
• Dr. Yan: Actually, Hong Kong was a free-speaking country. You could talk about things, you could check on things and have your own opinion. But since the Chinese Communist Party brought Hong Kong back to the mainland from the UK, they [the CCP] have been working hard on Hong Kong for 20 years. So Hong Kong became a place with less freedom, especially in the last two years with the Hong Kong movement.
• What we know is if you try to question the government, you try to question something that is very unfair, an injustice, done by the Hong Kong government and the CCP, you will get punished or even be disappeared [by authorities]. This has happened to the other Hong Kong protesters. Even your name won’t be left. Your family will be threatened, and no one dares to say this person existed. So it is now worse because they use the law to show the world how powerful they are. And even you, I’m sure now if you take the Cathay Pacific airline, you’d be sent off somewhere to be questioned by the CCP because you are doing something they don’t like.
• Mr. Jekielek: There’s that article in the national security law that says that even people who aren’t in Hong Kong and aren’t necessarily Chinese are also under its very ambiguous rules.
• Dr. Yan: Yes, exactly. So basically, if you say something that cannot pass their censorship, you are in trouble.
• Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Of course, we’ve mentioned this in a number of interviews before. Tell me a little bit about your career and where you came from. I want to give a chance for our audience to learn about you as a person. You said you lived in mainland China for 30 years, which is very different from working, of course, in Hong Kong. But tell me a little bit of how you got to your role and let’s start with what your position was when you left.
• Dr. Yan: When I left the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health, I was a postdoctoral fellow there. So I finished my medical studies and obtained my MD degree in China and then moved to another university in Guangzhou to get my PhD in ophthalmology. I was supposed to be an ophthalmologist, a surgeon, in China, but I wanted to pursue further research, so I moved to Hong Kong and changed my career to the School of Public Health, working on virology, immunology, and vaccine development. I’ve been in that WHO reference lab for five years, and I independently conducted the universal influenza vaccine project. Later, after the COVID-19 outbreak, besides my secret investigation as a representative of WHO, I also worked on some other research that is related to clinical studies and also lab studies about COVID-19.
• Mr. Jekielek: This is interesting. So you were mostly focused on influenza at the beginning?
• Dr. Yan: Yes, because my lab is a WHO influenza H5 Reference Lab. We are also the key state emergency disease lab for the Chinese government. And also, we conduct surveillance for zoonotic viruses all over the world, like SARS. At that time, my lab was the top lab doing this kind of study and now [it’s] still the top coronavirus lab in the world, with top virologists like Professor Malik Peiris, Professor Guan Yi, Professor Leo Poon and Dr. K. Y. [Kwok-yung] Yuen also work for the University of Hong Kong. So this is the group of people who have studied coronavirus since 2003 and later moved to MERS—a second type of coronavirus that gives people some bad effects and that affects our global health—and later we moved to COVID-19.
• Since COVID-19 came out, we also need to conduct this kind of research, and as a WHO reference lab, they need to report what they know about Global Health Surveillance issues to WHO and to the world. That’s why Professor Leo Poon, at the beginning, asked me to do the secret investigation as a representative of a WHO reference lab through my network in mainland China, because of the lack of information from the Chinese government.
• Mr. Jekielek: You’re basically saying that—I just want to make sure we got everything—your boss asked you to conduct an investigation, a little bit hidden, like you said, secret. Now, why did such an investigation need to be hidden?
• Dr. Yan: Because he knew that he could not get official information from the Chinese government. ... The CCP doesn’t want him to know [what’s going on], but he had to write a report at least to the Hong Kong government. And also as a WHO consultant, he wanted to know more about this. So that’s why he asked me to do the investigation in secret in case this gave us trouble—we couldn’t publicly do that.
• Mr. Jekielek: Interesting. Tell me a little bit about how this played out and maybe the timeline. When did you first become aware of this unknown virus? When did you become aware that it has lethality, that it’s human-to-human transmissible? Tell me a little bit about that.
• Dr. Yan: This is a long story, but briefly, back on December 31 last year when I was assigned this task, the first time I knew of this was after making contact and having discussions with very professional people back in mainland China. I got first-hand information that at that time, Wuhan already had over 40 cases confirmed—not as they said, 27. And also in Wuhan, they already had the genome sequence of the virus—not as they claimed [that they didn’t have it until] mid-January. And the other very important thing is that there was human-to-human transmission because there were family clusters. This is based on public health knowledge; you can quickly judge this.
• But China’s government doesn’t want people to talk about it or release this information. All this information is held by the top-level government in China, and they are the ones who give the statement. Everything has to be discussed based on their statement, even if you’re a doctor or professor. And also they want people to believe that this virus came from the Wuhan Huanan seafood market; although we see at least one-third of the people [who were infected] didn’t have that history. But without this history, you couldn’t get diagnosed.
• Mr. Jekielek: So you’re describing the inconsistencies you found talking to the different people in your network—the inconsistencies compared to the official party line.
• Dr. Yan: Yes. I reported back immediately to Professor Leo Poon, and he wanted me to keep this a secret. Later he also contacted one professional to get more information, and then told me, “You don’t need to do this now.” That was January 3. He said, “I can directly contact them, and I have to protect them.” “Protect” means that they know this is illegal according to Chinese invisible security state law. On January 16, I was again assigned this task for almost two weeks. Actually, Professor Leo Poon has his own way to know what is happening in China, and I was put aside, so I tried to get information by myself.
• Also at that time, as you may know, Dr. Li Wenliang was punished, so those doctors had to shut up about these issues. No more news came out, no more information, and I thought the WHO may have already gotten involved, until the next time I got into the investigation.
• Mr. Jekielek: There’s a lot going on in what you just told me. Let’s see if I’ve got it right. When did your boss take you off the case?
• Dr. Yan: January 3. But then later, on January 16, again he told me at his office that he wanted me to do more investigation about this and to be careful. Otherwise, I would be disappeared [by authorities].
• Mr. Jekielek: That’s what he said?
• Dr. Yan: Yes. Exactly what he said. “Don’t cross the red line.”
• Mr. Jekielek: So what would the red line be?
• Dr. Yan: As I mentioned [when I was interviewed in] “War Room: Pandemic,” actually, the red line is a thing in your mind. You are trained by the CCP government, so you understand things that they don’t like. That means, “Don’t cross the red line.” So if you cannot see the red line, you have to make judgments by yourself. But that means, in case you do cross the red line by accident, you have to face the risk, so the safest thing to do is to get far away from it. So that’s why people keep silent when facing these things.
• Mr. Jekielek: So are you saying that he was telling you to investigate but not seriously?
• Dr. Yan: No. Let me explain. For us Chinese, under CCP rule, we understand that it is something he, as a WHO consultant, wanted me to do, and when I do the investigation, I have to be careful because there are a lot of invisible lines there, and I have to make judgments to know whether China’s government likes it or not. If I hear someone say, “Oh, our government doesn’t want us to talk about this,” then I should stop there and turn back to tell him, “Yes, this is a line, and that side, there is another line.” He will build his theory based on these lines in the immediate range.
• Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. That’s a very complicated way to do research.
• Dr. Yan: You have to have at least 30 years of training like me in mainland China to understand this [culture].
• Mr. Jekielek: At what point did you become convinced that there was human-to-human transmission?
• Dr. Yan: Early January, as I said. So from December 31, I knew that Wuhan already knew that. And also our government tried to deliver this sample to Beijing to do further tests. Basically, that means they can postpone the time to publish the result. And after that, you still cannot publish it. You have to tell the top-level government, let them make a statement. So I believe during the whole process, they are sure that there is human-to-human transmission.
• It’s not a difficult thing for you to make a judgment. When you see the history of the disease, you'll see people’s travel history and see how they came into contact with the patient and get infected, so these things are very basic facts you can get when you talk to the patient. And as a public health expert, it’s very easy for them to build on the facts that this is or isn’t human-to-human transmission.
• Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think they said it wasn’t?
• Dr. Yan: I think they have thousands of ways to explain that, like what they’re doing now. For me, I cannot explain their motive, but I can tell you what I saw then. Not only just that, they actually covered up a lot of things. More than that. So that’s just the beginning of their lies. If you have been staying in communist China, you will understand that sometimes even for a simple thing, they won’t tell you the truth. I cannot explain it because I don’t like to lie, but they lie. So that’s really something about the motive that we have to ask the CCP regime. They can answer it very well. They’re the experts.
• Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think the WHO basically followed the regime’s position as opposed to doing its own research? Or did it do its own research?
• Dr. Yan: You mean whether they have done the research by themselves?
• Mr. Jekielek: Yes.
• Dr. Yan: I heard that the WHO, from internal information, I’m sure there are some WHO consultants like Malik Peiris who have been to Wuhan. This is not published. But what I also know is the Chinese government doesn’t tell people the truth about what really happened in Wuhan. For example, if a WHO expert goes to Wuhan, they may not get the chance to go to the lab. That place may be where the virus came from. I mean, [inaudible] to anyone’s question. And also they are not allowed to get samples from the Wuhan Huanan seafood market. These are done by the local experts organized by the CCP. So based on this, the WHO experts can come to their own conclusions.
• But why do they only rely on the evidence that the CCP government gives them? That’s also another question people should ask. What we have seen is that the WHO lied during this COVID-19 pandemic, it collaborated with the CCP government, and also gave out misleading information later. They said that it’s not a pandemic, there’s no point to keep China isolated with a travel ban, no point to wear a mask, and no point to take hydroxychloroquine, and all these things.
• The WHO has done more damage than I thought in this crisis. Why do they do that? Why do they help the CCP government? It’s back to that question. Only they can give you an answer to their motive.
• Mr. Jekielek: Very, very interesting. Tell me your perspective on hydroxychloroquine.
• Dr. Yan: First, this is not a magic drug. There is no magic drug in the world. But we have to think about whether to use this drug or not based on reality. So practically, as a doctor, if you want to suggest to your patients to use something, you have to consider whether it’s safe and whether you have an alternative choice. And if there is some side effect, comparing that to the good effect, which is [more significant]?
• Hydroxychloroquine actually has been used for a long time, for over 60 years, initially as antimalarial for both prevention and also treatment. Long-term studies have already shown that long-term applications are safe even for pregnant ladies and kids. Of course, patients need to do a half-yearly check-up on their retinas but that is not a big deal compared to many other drugs.
• And also, hydroxychloroquine can be used as anti-SARS. Even Dr. Fauci has done some research about that back in 2005, I remember. And another thing is, if you focus on the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS—basically SARS-CoV-2 is the enhanced version of SARS—their core mechanism to target people is the cytokine storm. I have to mention that this was first discovered by Professor Malik Peiris.
• This means that you have an overreaction of immunity in your body. So your immune system becomes messed up, starts to attack the good as the bad, and this drug can overcome that. So this drug has been used for autoimmune diseases and for the long term. So based on the three facts that I have confirmed and verified, I think at this moment, facing a high mutating virus as SARS-CoV-2 and when we don’t have a very effective vaccine—it takes time to do studies on vaccines—and people have to have a good prevention for this highly contagious virus. Then this drug can be applied to help people with prevention and also treatment.
• Of course, we expect a universal vaccine, efficient vaccine, or even a better drug to overcome this. But at this moment, you can compare doctors’ clinical data, and you will see that the doctors’ data supports hydroxychloroquine. The quality is much better than those against hydroxychloroquine. You can see the result for yourself.
• Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk a little bit about the statistics coming out of China and get your opinion because in the U.S., you have a lot of media that will take the official statistics on COVID-19, or CCP virus as we call it at The Epoch Times and some others that we know of, and they will report those statistics as if they were facts. “China actually hasn’t had such a big problem with coronavirus, according to the official statistics; the U.S. is way ahead in deaths and cases, and everything else.” What’s your opinion on this?
• Dr. Yan: You mean the statistics of the death toll and also the confirmed cases from China?
• Mr. Jekielek: Correct.
• Dr. Yan: What I can tell you is maybe the Chinese government doesn’t even know how many people got infected and died, because there are many, many methods for diagnosis that I have heard of and I know confirmed from China during COVID-19. So as I mentioned, they can postpone the diagnosis and also just refuse to give you enough test kits to do the final diagnosis.
• I think maybe the people in the U.S. don’t know this very well, that in the U.S. and other countries, you can use the diagnostic methods with at least 90 to 95 percent accuracy, but in mainland China, although my lab at an early time developed a quick diagnostic kit that the WHO recommended to many countries, mainland China doesn’t apply that. They just use their own diagnostic kits, and many of their own only result in 20 to 30 percent accuracy.
• But 30 percent accuracy doesn’t mean that with 3 tests you can get a good result. No, that means at least you have to do 9 times or 11 times, then you get a real result. But remember, in mainland China, 2 tests and a result is confirmed. So you can imagine how many cases are ignored in such a situation. And one more thing that maybe can make you understand it better: we didn’t even have people die at Tiananmen in 1989 according to China’s government.
• Mr. Jekielek: The big question is, is there, in your opinion, a political will to underreport? That’s the allegation. That’s what the data that we’ve seen suggests that they’re grossly underreporting. I want to get your perspective on that.
• Dr. Yan: Based on the diagnostic cases, what I know is the real death rate is definitely much higher than what they reported because based on what we have studied, even the influenza study, China’s government uses another way to judge death cases.
• It’s not like in the U.S. and other countries where you get infected, you go to the hospital, and somehow you pass away due to either complications or other problems induced by these infections, then you’re counted as a death case of COVID-19. Now in China, from what I know, they even give these people some ventilation and other life support until their oral tests come back negative, twice, by using the swab sample, and then after that, they can remove the ventilation and say, “Oh, he died, but he didn’t die of COVID-19.”
• Mr. Jekielek: Do doctors in China know that there’s been a cover up and the reporting is inconclusive around the coronavirus?
• Dr. Yan: Not only doctors, even the common people know, especially when this began. They know that, and they are in fear, especially before I revealed it through the media, through YouTube media, and our government then had to change their statement to admitting that human-to-human transmission exists and that there are more cases outside of Wuhan. Before that, our government left those patients without results in the common ward of hospitals, and doctors, patients, and patients’ relatives didn’t wear protective clothing. They were all in fear, and also China’s government didn’t allow them to talk about it.
• Later, there were other measurements like you cannot publish papers without going through censorship, and you cannot do some kind of treatment, you have to follow guidance, like using some kind of Chinese medicine that they recommended. So these are all the things they already knew about.
• But I have to say, it’s not that they don’t want to tell the truth. There are some doctors and groups of professionals who really want to tell the truth, but considering the situation in mainland China, just like the Hong Kong national security law, with this kind of pressure, they have no way to talk about it. And if they do talk about it, they have to face huge losses in their lives. You cannot expect everyone to do such things. That takes a lot of courage. So they know it, and many more people know it, but they cannot talk about it in public.
• Mr. Jekielek: Why did you decide to go public with this, knowing the risk?
• Dr. Yan: Because I have been sent twice for this investigation, and in mid-January when I did the second investigation, I realized that the real situation was worse than I thought, and no actions from the WHO and the CCP government would overcome this. So at that time, on January 17, when I saw these things, I decided to tell it through my own way.
• I had to find a way to tell the world, at least to make our government understand that there is huge pressure from outside, you have to do something and not suspend this research from overseas experts. Instead, you should let the experts go to Wuhan to know what really happened because it was Chinese New Year at that time and millions of people travelled through Wuhan, a big city in central China, and this would result in an outbreak soon. But I knew I couldn’t rely on my supervisor or the government, so I thought that I had to reveal this through the only media I trust from Mr. Lu De.
• At that time, I knew my life would be threatened, and similar to the Hong Kong protesters or others who tried to tell the truth in mainland China, I could be disappeared at any time without any evidence. But I also couldn’t face [the consequences of not speaking out.] If in the future when I saw the outbreak emerge and people suffering from this since this was covered up and I didn’t tell the truth, I couldn’t face that—I wouldn’t forgive myself. And also I realized if at that time I didn’t tell the truth, that means I would lose my capacity to tell the truth in my life, so that’s why I decided to deliver the message to Mr. Lu De. At least before I got disappeared, I want someone else to send out this message.
• Mr. Jekielek: That’s incredible and very courageous. Briefly, tell me, what happened after this and how it is that you ended up coming to the United States?
• Dr. Yan: Several hours after Lu De’s show played on January 19 this year, our government quickly responded because they knew someone released the real information. So after four hours, the confirmed cases jumped from 60 to 198—tripled. And also the next day, they confirmed that there are other cases outside of Wuhan, in Guangzhou and in Shanghai. And then they admitted that human-to-human transmission exists. Also Chairman Xi Jinping issued a statement, the first statement in 2020, to update the level of SARS-CoV-2 as an infectious disease similar to SARS. Three days later, Wuhan got locked down.
• After that, there were more lies coming out, and that was beyond my expectations. They didn’t take real efficient measures to control this outbreak, so I was very angry and also disappointed with my government. I already had been investigating, so I knew more than other people. I realized that at that time.
• I kept working with Mr. Lu De and delivered my message through his platform to tell people, for example, about what happened in hospitals, how the government censored the study about COVID-19. My government understood that it definitely would go back and trace the source to Mr. Lu De. So in mid-April, Mr. Lu De told me that I was in danger. And also at that time, I realized that English-speaking countries are totally isolated from Chinese-speaking countries. Our message was efficiently delivered to our audience in Chinese, but overseas, when people are faced with this pandemic and with the misinformation by the WHO and the Chinese government, they don’t understand what happened.
• And I realized I may be the only one who can tell this truth to the world, but I really couldn’t tell it in Hong Kong. Once I stood out, I would be disappeared. You'd know nothing. So at that time, Mr. Lu De and the organization who helps people when they get persecuted by China’s government, they helped me to escape from Hong Kong. And I took the flight.
• Just several hours after I left, the Hong Kong policemen immediately knew it. The University of Hong Kong and the Vice-Chancellor Professor Zhang Xiang, organized alumni, students, and staff to search for me, to get all my information. And some people from my friend group worked with the Hong Kong government or the policemen. They told all my friends, even middle school friends back in China, that I have no privacy, that they have to tell the policemen all the details they know about me, especially related to COVID-19, because I was involved in a criminal case. And they had to take responsibility for hiding anything related to me.
• And for my parents, just the same day, when I was still on the flight, the Hong Kong government informed the Ministry of State Security in Beijing. And then they sent people to Qingdao, my hometown, to my home and threatened my family. My parents, I have to say, were brainwashed. And they obediently collaborated with them. [They thought] I was lying and I did something that harmed the security of my beloved homeland.
• And also from the middle of May, even before I came to the public, the Chinese government started to spread a lot of rumors to attack me. They made a fake Facebook account using my profile, and they spread rumors on Twitter using the cyber-military, and also on Reddit, on YouTube. They ruined my reputation.
• They tried to describe me as someone who is poor and does nothing, incapable and who wants to get money and a Green Card from the U.S. And although I have a Nature paper that I was a first co-author for, they just described me as a hamster keeper in Hong Kong. [They did things] like this. So they tried their best to ruin me and ruin my credibility, and stop me, keep me silent. And unfortunately, my husband, who I'd been married to for over seven years, collaborated with them in this case.
• Mr. Jekielek: I’m very, very sorry about all this. And sorry for laughing at the hamster keeper. We know you’re quite a bit more than a hamster keeper. I know that we just got a message that we have to finish up urgently, but any final words before we do?
• Dr. Yan: I think everyone deserves to know the truth and everyone is involved, your health, your economic situation, your life. So we should go back to the one who initiated this outbreak, and I mean the CCP government, and ask them to be accountable.
• Mr. Jekielek: Thank you very much. Such a pleasure to have you on and the best of luck.
• This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon exits the Manhattan Federal Court on August 20, 2020, in New York City. Bannon and three other defendants have been indicted for allegedly defrauding donors in a $25 million border wall fundraising campaign. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

A controversial new study getting attention in US conservative media claims the coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab — but the group behind the report is intimately linked to a prominent Trump ally and known China hawk: Steve Bannon.

And all I spoke to said the study is deeply flawed.

The article popped up on September 14 on Zenodo, a website for scientists and academics to upload their work before it has gone through any formal peer-review process. Right-wing media outlets like the New York Post quickly seized on the paper’s conclusion that the virus that causes Covid-19 was potentially man-made at a Chinese facility. The study’s lead author, the 36-year-old Yan Li-Meng [With a 2020 article, this would mean a birth year of 1983 or 1984], has already appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to say the Chinese government “intentionally” released the virus into the world.

That’s an explosive allegation that if true would crack the unsolved mystery of the coronavirus’s origins. But despite the boldness of the paper’s claims, there’s considerable evidence that Chinese researchers didn’t bioengineer SARS-CoV-2 and that the government didn’t deploy it as a bioweapon.

(Reminder: SARS-CoV-2 is the name for the coronavirus itself; Covid-19 is the name for the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.)

It’s important to note that most experts I spoke to said it remains possible the coronavirus accidentally leaked out of a lab. There is a major virology lab located in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus was first identified. At that facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, researchers study samples of bat coronaviruses (and other viruses) collected from the wild and reportedly conduct risky “gain-of-function” research on them, manipulating them in experiments to test their pandemic threat.

But it appears Yan and her three co-authors haven’t changed many minds in the scientific community with their reasoning for why this coronavirus appears to be bioengineered.

“It’s deeply speculative, and the scenarios proposed are not very believable,” said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and MIT’s Broad Institute. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, told me the study “is totally bogus.”

Other experts were similarly dumbfounded by the paper, especially since Yan has a prolific and solid publication record on infectious diseases. “You know better than to put your name behind this utter garbage, much less write it yourself,” Jasnah Kholin, Yan’s former colleague at the University of Hong Kong (who uses an alias online), tweeted on Tuesday. Twitter suspended Yan’s account on Wednesday for her lead role in writing the fact-challenged paper.

Why, though, is Yan’s study so bad, especially with her once-sterling credentials? The reason may have a lot to do with Bannon’s years-long effort to discredit China no matter the cost — and Yan’s willingness to help.

“This all plays into Bannon’s larger argument about China and the threat it poses to everybody on the planet,” said Michael Swaine, an expert on Chinese security issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in Washington. “It just serves his interests.”

What the Bannon-backed, Yan-led coronavirus study actually says

Before getting to why Bannon and Yan work together, it’s worth quickly going through the main claim and three strands of supporting evidence Yan and her team offered in their study, titled “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route.”

Their headline assertion is that the mainstream view of SARS-CoV-2 as a naturally occurring virus “lacks substantial support,” and that the virus “shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus.” They stress “the need for an independent investigation into the relevant research laboratories,” but don’t identify one in particular, including the facility in Wuhan.

For many experts, the notion that the disease might be man-made by Chinese researchers isn’t a wild one.

“Given the moral antipathy and the secrecy surrounding any biological weapons program, and given the difficulty of differentiating a naturally occurring outbreak and a deliberately caused one, it is not entirely invalid or illegitimate to suspect the virus was man-made,” said Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “I don’t challenge Dr. Yan’s credentials in making such bold arguments.”

And Chan, the Broad Institute fellow who dismisses Yan’s paper, noted that similar coronaviruses have been found in labs as early as 2013.

The question of whether Chinese scientists created this specific coronavirus in a lab, then, is worth trying to prove. Successfully doing so is an entirely different matter — and the three pieces of evidence the Yan-led researchers offer are “easily disproven,” said Columbia’s Rasmussen.

First, the authors say the virus’s genes look “suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military laboratories” elsewhere in China. That seems bad, but Rasmussen notes that it makes sense this disease would have similar-looking genes to other coronaviruses because it is a coronavirus. “They are similar because they are related,” she said.

Second, Yan’s team says part of the spike protein the current coronavirus uses to infect cells looks like the 2003 SARS spike protein “in a suspicious manner.” In other words, they’re implying the virus isn’t natural — someone changed it. But that’s not the case, Rasmussen says: Those “are found in other coronaviruses. They arose naturally and coincidentally.”

Third, the paper states the SARS-CoV-2 virus has a “unique” furin cleavage site — a section of the spike protein — asserting that such a feature isn’t found in the natural world. But Rasmussen said many coronaviruses have these sites, including the 2012 MERS coronavirus first found in the Middle East. “This proves exactly nothing,” she told me.

Altogether, there’s just little Yan’s team offered to convince their peers they found what they say they found. There’s always fierce debate in academic and scientific literature, of course, but the easily refuted assertions make it hard to take much of what they wrote seriously.

Plus, as Huang told me, “that the paper was not peer-reviewed and was backed by a political nonprofit raises further questions on the credibility of the paper.”

This is where we find Bannon.

Yan and Bannon have a mutually beneficial relationship

Yan’s study was published by the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, two New York City-based groups Bannon helped create alongside Guo Wengui, a Chinese dissident and billionaire who has long sought political asylum in the US after facing bribery, fraud, and money-laundering charges back home. It was on Guo’s yacht that US Postal Service officers arrested Bannon last month for defrauding donors to another, unrelated nonprofit.

The main goal both organizations share is to expose malfeasance by the Chinese Communist Party-led government, a target Bannon has worked tirelessly to embarrass and overthrow. Their mission dovetails nicely with the work of G News, a Bannon- and Guo-supported website that has already published articles asserting — without clear evidence — that China’s military created the coronavirus.

Bannon — the former executive chairman of Breitbart News who led Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and worked as Trump’s White House chief strategist — has for years blamed China for harming America’s economy via unfair trade practices and theft of intellectual property. In Guo, Bannon clearly found an ally with whom to combat the Chinese regime.

“Guo has been the toughest Chinese opponent the CCP has ever encountered,” Bannon told the Washington Post on Sunday, using an acronym for the Chinese Communist Party. “He has been the world’s leading fighter exposing the lies, the infiltration, and the malevolence of the CCP.”

Yan is also not a fan of the Chinese government. She fled Hong Kong for the United States in April out of fear of political persecution.

She told Fox News in July that she had evidence the Chinese government knew the disease transferred between humans back in December, aiming to blow the whistle on the regime, but that her then-superiors at the University of Hong Kong’s public health laboratory — a World Health Organization research center — had told her to keep quiet. The university denies any of that happened.

While in the US, Yan linked up with the Bannon- and Guo-backed nonprofits, though it remains unclear exactly when or why (she didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment).

The general suspicion, including among those who don’t like her recent paper, is that she found a group of people who share her view that the Chinese government purposefully put the world in danger. Yan wanted a place to offer that analysis and keep safe from the regime, and staying in Hong Kong — amid a Beijing-backed crackdown on dissent — wasn’t an option.

Kholin, Yan’s former colleague at the university who bashed her paper, told me Yan “is not safe here.”

Coming to the US and joining Bannon and Guo’s projects offered her a prominent platform to say her piece. “I could not stay silent,” Yan told the UK’s Daily Mail in August. “I could see China was covering up the truth and I had to do something since I was a professional who could explain it.”

If there is one thing that this entire saga has made clear - it is that whistleblowers (as it pertains to SARS2) have no obvious safe route of sharing their information.

Seriously, who should a SARS2 origins whistleblower go to? Besides this anti-CCP billionaire + Bannon et al.?

— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) September 17, 2020

The best approach to obtaining the truth from a whistleblower is to remove their dependency on their host/savior. Someone who they now have to rely on for security the rest of their life. Do people seriously think that this is not a consideration for whistleblowers?

— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) September 17, 2020

Bannon and Guo likely didn’t bring Yan in solely out of the goodness of their hearts. Having a Chinese virologist with sterling credentials make the case that the Chinese Communist Party created and unleashed the coronavirus on the world is far more powerful than having Bannon or Guo say it.

Since associating herself with Bannon and Guo, she’s made a steady stream of appearances on their various media outlets, including Bannon’s podcast in August, to discuss her views on the Chinese government and the coronavirus. Her analysis at the time, though, was more political than scientific.

“If this is something come from nature, the government has no responsibility for that. Why do they recruit such big force to stop people from understanding what happened?” she said. “If this is an accident come from some lab in China ... why don’t they try to stop it?”

“They don’t need to hide this kind of truth if this has a nature origins,” she concluded, later calling the Communist Party’s actions “evil.”

[ DELETED ... https://youtu.be/ZH8I06W_u5g?t=2324 ]

She’s gone on to serve as Bannon’s key witness of sorts on the China coronavirus issue. Over time, though, she’s also adopted positions that fit popular narratives among conservatives.

Namely, she’s promoted hydroxychloroquine as effective against Covid-19 — echoing Trump and other prominent conservatives — despite ample scientific evidence against that claim. G News, the Bannon and Guo-backed website, publicized her comments on the drug. Whether she truly believes the medication is helpful or is just boosting conservative talking points to stay in Bannon and Guo’s good graces is unclear.

Kholin thinks it’s the latter. “I think it’s being in an atmosphere that fosters conspiracy theories while feeling pressured to justify her existence,” she told me, “and honestly that fear is fully justified.”

Either way, Yan’s views have clearly reached a prominent audience and certainly will continue to do so. On a September 15 segment on Fox Business, host Lou Dobbs and the Hudson Institute’s Michael Pillsbury — an informal adviser to Trump on China — spent time praising Yan’s work.

Trump retweeted Dobbs’s tweet of the clip.

Scientists from Johns Hopkins, Columbia and other leading American universities moved with rare speed when a Chinese virologist, Li-Meng Yan, published an explosive paper in September claiming that China had created the deadly coronavirus in a research lab.

The paper, the American scientists concluded, was deeply flawed. And a new online journal from MIT Press — created specifically to vet claims related to SARS-CoV-2 — reported Yan’s claims were “at times baseless and are not supported by the data” 10 days after she posted them.

But in an age when anyone can publish anything online with a few clicks, this response was not fast enough to keep Yan’s disputed allegations from going viral, reaching an audience in the millions on social media and Fox News. It was a development, according to experts on misinformation, that underscored how systems built to advance scientific understanding can be used to spread politically charged claims dramatically at odds with scientific consensus.

Yan’s work, which was posted to the scientific research repository Zenodo without any review on Sept. 14, exploded on Twitter, YouTube and far-right websites with the help of such conservative influencers as Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who repeatedly pushed it on his online show “War Room: Pandemic,” according to a report published Friday by Harvard researchers studying media manipulation. Yan expanded her claims, on Oct. 8, to blame the Chinese government explicitly for developing the coronavirus as a “bioweapon.”

Online research repositories have become key forums for revelation and debate about the pandemic. Built to advance science more nimbly, they have been at the forefront of reporting discoveries about masks, vaccines, new coronavirus variants and more. But the sites lack protections inherent to the traditional — and much slower — world of peer-reviewed scientific journals, where articles are published only after they have been critiqued by other scientists. Research shows papers posted to online sites also can be hijacked to fuel conspiracy theories.

Yan’s paper on Zenodo — despite several blistering scientific critiques and widespread news coverage of its alleged flaws — now has been viewed more than 1 million times, probably making it the most widely read research on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Harvard misinformation researchers. They concluded that online scientific sites are vulnerable to what they called “cloaked science,” efforts to give dubious work “the veneer of scientific legitimacy.”

“They’re many years behind in realizing the capacity of this platform to be abused,” said Joan Donovan, research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which produced the report. “At this point, everything open will be exploited.”

Yan, who previously was a postdoctoral fellow at Hong Kong Universitybut fled to the United States in April, agreed in an interview with The Washington Post that online scientific sites are vulnerable to abuse, but she rejected the argument that her story is a case study in this problem.

Rather, Yan said, she is a dissident trying to warn the world about what she says is China’s role in creating the coronavirus. She used Zenodo, with its ability to instantly publish information without restrictions, because she feared the Chinese government would obstruct publication of her work. Her academic critics, she argued, will be proven wrong.

“None of them can rebut from real, solid, scientific evidence,” Yan said. “They can only attack me.”

Zenodo acknowledged that the furor has prompted reforms, including the posting of a label Thursday above Yan’s paper saying, “Caution: Potentially Misleading Contents” after The Washington Post asked whether Zenodo would remove it. The site also prominently features links to critiques from a Georgetown University virologist and the MIT Press.

“We take misinformation really seriously, so it is something that we want to address,” said Anais Rassat, a spokeswoman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates Zenodo as a general purpose scientific site. “We don’t think taking down the report is the best solution. We want it to stay and indicate why experts think it’s wrong.”

But mainstream researchers who watched Yan’s claims race across the Internet far more quickly than they could counter them have been left troubled by the experience — newly convinced that the capacity for spreading misinformation goes far beyond the big-name social media sites. Any online platform without robust and potentially expensive safeguards is equally vulnerable.

“This is similar to the debate we’re having with Facebook and Twitter. To what degree are we creating an instrument that speeds disinformation, and to what extent are you contributing to that?” said Stefano M. Bertozzi, editor in chief of the MIT Press online journal “Rapid Reviews: COVID-19,” which challenged Yan’s claims.

Bertozzi added, “Most scientists have no interest in getting in a pissing match in cyberspace.”

Coronavirus fuels prominence of online science sites

Online scientific sites have been growing for more than a decade, becoming a vital part of the ecosystem for making and vetting claims across numerous academic fields, but their growth has been supercharged by the urgency of disseminating new discoveries about a deadly pandemic.

Some of the best-known of these sites, such as medRxiv and bioRxiv, have systems for rapid evaluation intended to avoid publishing work that doesn’t pass an initial sniff test of scientific credibility. They also reject papers that only review the work of others or that make such major claims that they shouldn’t be publicized before peer review can be conducted, said Richard Sever, co-founder of medRxiv and bioRxiv.

“We want to create a hurdle that’s high enough that people have to do some research,” Sever said. “What we don’t want to be is a place where there’s a whole bunch of conspiracy theories.”

Online publishing sites generally are called “preprint servers” because many researchers use them as a first step toward traditional peer review, giving the authors a way to make their work public — and available for possible news coverage — before more thorough analysis begins. Advocates of preprint servers tout their ability to create early visibility for important discoveries and also spark useful debate. They note that traditional peer-reviewed journals have their own history of occasionally publishing hoaxes and bad science.

“It’s very funny that everyone is worrying about preprints given that, collectively, journals are not doing a great job of keeping misinformation out,” Sever said.

He and other proponents, however, acknowledge risks.

While scientists debate — and sometimes refute — flawed claims by one another, nonscientists also scan preprint servers for data that might appear to bolster their pet conspiracy theories.

A research team led by computer scientist Jeremy Blackburn has tracked the appearance of links to preprints from social media sites, such as 4chan, popular with conspiracy theorists. Blackburn and a graduate student, Satrio Yudhoatmojo, found more than 4,000 references on 4chan to papers on major preprint servers between 2016 and 2020, with the leading subjects being biology, infectious diseases and epidemiology. He said the uneven review process has “lent an air of credibility” to preprints that experts might quickly spot as flawed but ordinary people wouldn’t.

“That’s where the risk is,” said Blackburn, an assistant professor at Binghamton University. “Papers from the preprint servers show up in a variety of conspiracy theories … and are misinterpreted wildly because these people aren’t scientists.”

Jessica Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, a nonprofit group that pushes for more transparency and wider use of preprint servers, said they rely on something akin to crowdsourcing, in which comments from outside researchers quickly can identify flaws in work, but she acknowledged vulnerabilities based on the extent of review by server staff and advisers. A recent survey by ASAPbio found more than 50 preprint servers operating — and nearly as many review policies.

And the survey didn’t include Zenodo, which, Polka said, should not be considered a preprint server given its broader mission. Rather, she said, it’s an online repository that happens to host some preprints, as well as conference slides, raw data and other “scientific objects” that anyone with an email address can simply upload. Zenodo has none of the vetting common to major preprint servers and isn’t organized to easily surface critiques or conflicting research, she said.

“Without that kind of context, a preprint server is even more vulnerable to the spread of disinformation,” Polka said. But she added, in general, “Preprint servers do not have the resources to be arbiters of whether something is true or not.”

Yan defends her work

Yan said in her interview with The Post that Zenodo’s openness is what drove her decision to use the site. She had initially submitted her paper to bioRxiv because as a researcher whose work has appeared in Nature, the Lancet Infectious Diseases and other traditional publications, she knew that this preprint server would appear more legitimate to other scientists.

Yan has a medical degree from Xiangya Medical College of Central South University and a PhD in ophthalmology from Southern Medical University — both in China — and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, she said. That university announced she was no longer affiliated with it in July, following an initial appearance on Fox News, saying in a statement that her claim about the origin of the coronavirus “has no scientific basis but resembles hearsay.”

After she fled Hong Kong, she harbored deep suspicions about that government’s potential to block publication of her work, she said. When she checked bioRxiv 48 hours after making her submission, the site appeared to have gone offline, Yan said. Fearing the worst, she withdrew the paper and uploaded it to Zenodo.

Sever, the bioRxiv co-founder, said he could not comment on an individual submission but said that, despite occasional glitches, he was aware of no “prolonged outage” on the site during mid-September and no sign that the Chinese, or anyone else, had hacked it.

For Yan’s paper on Zenodo, she did not list an academic affiliation, as is customary for research. Instead, she listed the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation, which are New York-based nonprofit groups founded by exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a close associate of Bannon, who in 2018 was announced as chairman of the Rule of Law Society. When Bannon was arrested on fraud charges in August, he was aboard Guo’s 150-foot yacht, off the coast of Connecticut. (President Donald Trump last month pardoned Bannon, his former campaign chairman and White House chief strategist).

Yan said she listed the Rule of Law entities out of respect for what she said was their work helping dissidents in China, and that they paid for her flight from Hong Kong and provided a resettlement stipend while she largely lives off her savings. She said her work is independent, and she rejected notions that Bannon was helping her spread political claims.

“I didn’t know he was so controversial when I was in Hong Kong,” Yan told The Post.

On Sept. 15, the day after Yan’s paper appeared on Zenodo, she was a guest on Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” an appearance watched by 4.8 million broadcast viewers and 2.8 million on YouTube, and that also generated extensive engagement on Facebook and Twitter, according to the Harvard researchers. Bannon appeared on Carlson’s show that same week and discussed Yan’s claims. He also interviewed her on “War Room: Pandemic” 22 times last year, both before and after the Zenodo publication.

The political context was obvious in the midst of a hotly contested election in which Trump was attacking Democratic rival Joe Biden for supposedly being overly sympathetic to the Chinese government, dubbing him “Beijing Joe.” Republicans, including White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, pushed Yan’s paper along with the hashtag #CCPLiedPeopleDied, a reference to the Chinese Communist Party.

Archives showed the paper had more than 150,000 views on its first day on Zenodo — spectacular reach for a scientific paper, especially one that had not yet been reviewed by any independent experts.

But this surge of attention also generated backlash, including critical news reports by National Geographic and others, raising serious questions about Yan’s claims.

In the academic world, the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins issued a point-by-point response one week after Yan’s paper appeared on Zenodo, raising 39 individual issues in what it said was “objective analysis of details included in the report, as would be customary in a peer-review process.”

A few days later, the MIT Press online journal “Rapid Reviews: COVID-19” featured four scathing reviews, including one from Robert Gallo, a renowned AIDS researcher and a titan within the field of virology.

He labeled Yan’s work “misleading” and cited “questionable, spurious, and fraudulent claims.” Most points were highly technical, but Gallo also questioned her logic regarding the alleged role in creating the coronavirus for the Chinese military, which Gallo noted would be vulnerable to covid-19.

“And how would the Chinese protect themselves?” Gallo asked in his review. “Well, according to the paper, the military knew it could be stopped by remdesivir,” a drug later shown to have some benefit in treating covid-19 while not necessarily reducing the risk of death. “I would surely not want to be in the Chinese military if they were that naive.”

Questions about the research and the process

The idea to recruit Gallo came from Bertozzi, the journal’s editor and dean emeritus of the School of Public Health at University of California at Berkeley. Like Gallo, Bertozzi had worked extensively in AIDS research. After seeing Yan’s appearance on Fox, he was eager to use the online journal founded only months earlier to correct the scientific record.

“I felt it needed to be quickly debunked by people with scientific credibility,” Bertozzi said.

He soon thought of Gallo.

“We need somebody of your stature to say this is garbage science,” Bertozzi recalled telling him.

The reviews by Gallo and three other scientists also came with an editor’s note raising questions about the preprint process itself, saying, “While pre-print servers offer a mechanism to disseminate world-changing scientific research at unprecedented speed, they are also a forum through which misleading information can instantaneously undermine the international scientific community’s credibility, destabilize diplomatic relationships, and compromise global safety.”

But these public rebukes from some of the biggest names in virology did not deter Yan. Nor did a detailed report on Oct. 21 by CNN quoting her critics and documenting flaws.

Yan declined to be interviewed for that story, she said, because CNN did not allow her to address the issues they unearthed, point by point, on live television.

Instead, she published her own response on Nov. 21, on Zenodo, titled, “CNN Used Lies and Misinformation to Muddle the Water on the Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

In her Post interview, Yan acknowledged — as CNN had reported — that her three co-authors on the original Sept. 14 paper were pseudonyms, used to protect what she said were other Chinese researchers whose families remain in peril back in China. Authors are typically discouraged from using false names in academic work.

Her claims suffered another blow this week, when a World Health Organization team sent to China to investigate the origins of the pandemic issued a statement saying it was “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus came from a lab.

One of Yan’s earliest vocal critics, virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was at Columbia when Yan’s paper first spread, agreed with WHO’s assessment but did not rule out the possibility — however unlikely — of laboratory origin for the coronavirus. But she said the argument lacks concrete evidence.

“There needs to be a lot less speculation and a lot more investigation,” said Rasmussen, now an affiliate at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. “It takes a really long time to figure this stuff out... This is going to take years or even decades to solve it, if we ever do.”

Yet Yan continues to double down on her claims and to attack her critics as spreading “lies.” She still argues that the Chinese government intentionally created the coronavirus and continues to do everything it can to silence her.

Yan also offers no apologies for making common cause with Bannon and other Trump allies. As a dissident, she said, she doesn’t necessarily get her choice of supporters.

“If China is going to do this crime, who can hold them accountable?… Trump was the one who was tough” against China, Yan said, adding that her claim “is about real fact. I don’t want to mislead people.”

Even now, she is preparing another paper, nearing 30 pages, that she hopes will refute her critics and bring fresh attention to her claims about China, covid-19 and what she says is an international coverup campaign.

Yan plans to publish it in a few weeks, she said — on Zenodo.

§1. “I’m Doctor Li-Meng Yan, you can call me Scarlett.”

No, no, no! Wait on, I’m sick of all the Chinese who pretend to be George, Mike, Sue or whatnot. Same for the Indians who answer your call, “Hi, I’m George, how can I help you?”, when he’s Manju, Ganesh, Rajiv, or Rishi. So find a diminutive if your name is difficult to a Westerner, but stop claiming to be George or Scarlett, dammit!

Dr. Li-Meng “Scarlett” Yan (Yan is the family name) is a strange creature or, as per Wikipedia,

• a Chinese virologist, known for publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. These publications have been widely criticised by the scientific community. In April 2020, she fled to the United States.

• …

• Between September 2020 and March 2021, Yan authored a series of four preprint research papers, wherein she argued that SARS-CoV-2 did not emerge naturally in a “spillover from animals,” but rather was produced in a laboratory.

• …

• Yan’s preprint was promoted by the Rule of Law Society, a political organisation affiliated with Steve Bannon, former Trump strategist, and Guo Wengui, an expatriate Chinese billionaire, in November 2018. The organisation’s stated intent was to investigate “Chinese corruption and financially support victims of the regime.” The Rule of Law Society had not previously published scientific or medical research. Yan previously appeared on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. The lack of financial disclosure in Yan’s papers was described as a lapse in ethical transparency by Dr. Adam Lauring, particularly when publishing “what are essentially conspiracy theories that are not founded in fact”.

• In November 2020, The New York Times reported that Yan’s “trajectory was carefully crafted” by Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui, who played to rising anti-Chinese sentiments, with the goal of bringing down China’s government and distracting from the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Times article pointed out that Guo and Bannon arranged for Yan to fly first class to the United States, arranged lodging, coached her on media appearances, and arranged interviews for her with conservative media hosts such as Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson.

This Wikipedia page might have been written by the Chinese Communist Party, but how can you trust such claims from “Scarlett” (from her Twitter)?