My Take | Anti-China virologist and conspiracy theorist Yan Limeng may be Beijing’s best friend
- China can easily dismiss well-founded medical criticism and conspiracy theories alike by lumping them all together while pushing its own triumphalist narrative on its early success in suppressing the pandemic
The theory that China created and leaked the deadly coronavirus at a biosecurity lab in Wuhan has mostly been associated with a series of discredited papers published by Yan, who left the University of Hong Kong last year under a cloud of controversy, also for making unfounded but different claims about the university’s research on the virus.
Millions of Americans apparently believe Yan’s Covid-19 origin story, even after some of their country’s leading scientific authorities have debunked it. This was no accident, according to a new study, “Cloaked Science: The Yan Reports”, by the Media Manipulation Casebook project at Harvard University.
Since landing in the United States last April, Yan has allied herself with the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation, founded and run by fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon, the former top adviser at the Donald Trump White House.
On Thursday, Zenodo, the scientific research repository where she first published her lab-leak claim in an incendiary paper in September without being peer-reviewed, finally put up a warning above it: “Caution: Potentially Misleading Contents”. In October, she released another paper claiming the virus was an engineered bioweapon. The September paper has had more than 1 million views, making it the most read publication on the site.
As a result of the furore, Zenodo has also reformed procedures for publication.