Benutzer:KAOSkonfused/Li-Meng Yan

Vorlage:Pp-protected Vorlage:Use mdy dates Vorlage:Short description Vorlage:Infobox medical person Vorlage:Chinese name Li-Meng Yan (chinesisch 閆麗夢) or Yan Limeng, is a Chinese virologist who claims as part of her work to have been aware of person to person transmission of COVID-19 in late December 2019 and to have tried to communicate the risks to those higher up the chain of command in January 2020. She alleges that the Chinese government and the World Health Organization (WHO) knew about the person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 earlier than they reported or made public, and suppressed both her research and others.

In April 2020, she fled to the United States where, in September 2020, she co-authored a widely-disputed pre-print research paper alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory.

Background

Yan's hometown is Qingdao. She received her MD degree from Xiangya Medical College of Central South University and went on to earn her PhD from Southern Medical University. Her research includes the study of The inhibition effect of propranolol on the corneal neovascularization in an alkali-induced injury mouse model and the challenges in developing a universal influenza vaccine.

Transmission of COVID-19

Yan said that she was one of the first scientists in the world to study the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, after Leo Poon, her supervisor at the University of Hong Kong (a WHO reference lab), asked her to look into a cluster of SARS-like cases in Wuhan, in December 2019. According to Fox News, Yan maintained an extensive network of medical professionals from mainland China, one of whom purportedly told Yan about human-to-human transmission of the novel disease on 31 December 2019. According to Yan, she reported her findings about the virus multiple times to her superiors, including on 16 January, after which she says she was warned by her supervisor "to keep silent and be careful."

Before the Chinese government publicly said it knew of human-to-human transmission, in a January 2020 interviewVorlage:Not in source with "LuDe Media" (「路德社」), owned by Guo Wengui, Yan accused the Chinese government of knowing about this aspect of the novel coronavirus. She fled to the United States on 28 April with what she said was her intention of delivering "the message of the truth of COVID," adding if she tried to tell her story in China, she said that she would be "disappeared and killed."

Between July and August, Yan was interviewed by Fox News, Newsmax TV, and the Daily Mail. In July, Yan said that she and her colleagues had an obligation to tell the world of their research given their status as a WHO reference laboratory. She also accused her supervisors, including Leo Poon and Malik Peiris, of ignoring her research.

In July 2020, a press release from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) stated:

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's press release did not mention when and why Yan left HKU. According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the director of HKU's School of Public Health, Keiji Fukuda, said in an internal memo to staff that none of the researchers named by Yan were involved in any cover-up or "secret research".

Published research

Yan co-authored a three-paragraph-long paper entitled "Viral dynamics in mild and severe cases of COVID-19", published in The Lancet in March 2020, regarding the viral shedding patterns observed in COVID-19 patients. Four of the nine co-authors were from HKU and the remaining five were from the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University.

She also co-authored "Pathogenesis and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in golden hamsters", published in Nature in May 2020 regarding transmission of the virus in hamsters. This paper was also co-authored by her now-former colleagues at HKU. The abstract of the paper states that SARS-CoV-2 has a "high nucleotide identity" to SARS-related coronaviruses detected in horseshoe bats.

Paper on origins of SARS-CoV-2

In September 2020, Yan co-authored a pre-print research paper named "Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route." Three other researchers were listed as co-authors, but the SCMP was unable to find any prior work from them. The paper was uploaded to the Zenodo website, an open-access repository where anyone can post their research. The paper is affiliated with the Rule of Law Society, founded by Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui. The Rule of Law Society had not previously published scientific or medical research. Yan had previously appeared on Bannon's "War Room" podcast.

According to the paper's abstract, "SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus" and that it could have been created in a lab in approximately six months. As of September 21, 2020, the paper has not been submitted to a scientific peer-reviewed publication.

Concerning its central claim, a September 21 review of the pre-print by four authors from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said,

Yan et al refer to an extensive scientific literature providing "genomic, structural, and literature evidence" to counter the prevailing theory in the scientific community that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a natural zoonosis, emerging from animals, but they do not cite any references to support their claim—a crucial basic practice for any researcher.

According to Newsweek, several experts in evolutionary biology and infectious disease, including Jonathan Eisen and Carl Bergstrom, said the paper did not include new information, contained multiple unsubstantiated claims and had a weak scientific case. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, said the paper was "basically all circumstantial and some of it is entirely fictional". For example the paper asserts that SARS-CoV-2 has a "unique" furin cleavage site in its protein structure "completely absent in this particular class of coronaviruses found in nature"; however Rasmussen says that many coronaviruses, including the 2012 MERS coronavirus, have these sites and that hence "This proves exactly nothing."

Yan's paper also stated that two strains of bat coronaviruses discovered in China, ZC45 and ZXC21, were "suspiciously" similar to SARS-CoV-2 and these strains could have been used as a template for a deadlier virus. The two strains differed by approximately 3,500 nucleotide base pairs. Several virologists, including Rasmussen, said it would be either inefficient or impossible to engineer a virus where 10% of its genome would have to be replaced.

In addition to citing many other unpublished pre-print papers, Yan's September 2020 pre-print cited online blogs and obscure web sites named "GM Watch" and "Nerd Has Power". Immunologist Kristian G. Andersen, a specialist in communicable diseases and genomics who was one author of a March 2020 journal article in Nature Medicine entitled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2" which definitively stated the virus was not created in a lab, and Yujia Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher, both said the paper left out recent data related to coronavirus in pangolins and bats. Andersen further characterized the paper's prose with the statement: "It's using technical language that is impossible to decode for non-experts - poppycock dressed up as 'science'."

After describing her newly published research paper in a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson in mid-September 2020, Yan said she believed the Chinese government intentionally released the virus. Instagram and Facebook flagged posts of the interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight as false information about COVID-19, saying that they repeated information “that multiple independent fact checkers say is false.” PolitiFact said her statement on Carlson's show, that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, was "inaccurate and ridiculous" and gave their strongest rating of "Pants on Fire".

On 15 September 2020, Yan's Twitter account was suspended, although the reason for the suspension was unclear. She had only four visible posts, one of which linked to the preprint paper.

See also

• Ai Fen