A Chinese virologist who became the face of the COVID-19 lab-origin theory is now living in hiding in the United States, convinced Beijing is trying to lure her back to China to silence her permanently, according to a new New York Times report.
Dr. Li-Meng Yan, once a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hong Kong, fled to the U.S. in 2020 after publicly claiming that the Chinese government engineered and intentionally released the coronavirus. Her accusations made her a star on conservative media, but Yan now says they also made her a target for the Chinese Communist Party.
“For over five years, the CCP has used my parents and Mahen as tools to lure me back, attempting to carry out a ‘perfect crime,’” Yan told the Times, alleging that Chinese authorities are weaponizing her family to pressure her return.
Yan’s husband, veteran virologist Ranawaka Perera, says Yan grew increasingly consumed by online influencers who promoted her as a whistleblower. Some, including YouTuber Wang Dinggang, helped engineer her escape with support from a foundation tied to Steve Bannon and exiled billionaire Guo Wengui.
Once in the U.S., Yan became a fixture on the MAGA media circuit, including repeated appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, amplifying claims that scientists manufactured the virus in a Wuhan lab. Bannon later credited her with fueling the rise of the lab-leak narrative: “A lot of it was because of Dr. Yan.”
But Yan’s scientific credibility collapsed quickly. Her paper alleging COVID’s deliberate engineering was rejected by experts across the scientific community, and Hong Kong University stressed she was a junior researcher with limited experience.
Still, her fears of CCP retaliation are not unfounded. In 2023, Yan was named as a victim in a federal criminal complaint accusing Chinese police of running a transnational repression scheme inside the U.S. And earlier this year, Google alerted her to a likely state-sponsored hacking attempt targeting her accounts.
The virologist now lives in isolation, estranged from her family in China. Perera, who traveled to the U.S. in hopes of finding her, says he only wants to know she is safe.
“I just want to talk to her directly,” he told the Times. “If she’s safe and doesn’t want to be with me, I can move on. But not until I know exactly what happened.”
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3 Responses
Her husband is surely under pressure to do the CCP’s bidding for fear that they the rest of his and her family suffer further, so I don’t take his comments to the NYT at face value. Most who read uncensored media know that a lab origin of some kind is most likely. The damning evidence of misinformation in the form of biased evidentiary claims in the peer-reviewed literature pushing is voluminous.
She writes at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Limeng-Yan that even ResearchGate is censoring her work on the origin – for “sensitive content”.
As her Zenodo writings state, “The origin of SARS-CoV-2 … has been portrayed by some as a great mystery, although the laboratory nature of this virus is evident to people with trained eyes. The fundamental reason for this current situation is a large-scale, multi-domain, deliberate scientific misinformation.”
“experts across the scientific community” are the people under question. The defendant cannot be the expert witness.
the two factors at play here are: the belief system of the conservative media, and the actions of the ccp. obviously, the maga crowd want to protect their star witness, and with her, their beliefs. and equally obviously, the ccp wants to silence a critic of their rule, and has the means to do so. interestingly, neither side is overly concerned with the truth.