Who is Dr Li-Meng Yan? Chinese Virologist Who Claimed Of COVID-19 Virus Leak

Dr Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist was among the first persons to claim that the coronavirus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan. She recently said that Dr Anthony Fauci’s emails prove that her claims were right.

“They verify my work from the very beginning, even from last January, that these people know what happened, but they choose to hide for the Chinese Communist Party and for their own benefits,” Dr Li-Meng Yan told Newsmax. She claimed that Dr Fauci knew a lot of things.

“Dr Fauci even back to 1st of February last year immediately realized that there would be gain-of-function experiment involved in the COVID-19 virus," she added.

Here's what we know about Dr Li-Meng Yan:

1. Dr Li-Meng Yan is a Chinese virologist and opthalmologist.
2. She earned her PhD in ophthalmology from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou. It is reported that she earned an MD or a master's degree in ophthalmology from Xiangya Medical College.
3. She was earlier a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong.
4. In April last year, Dr Li-Meng Yan fled to the United States. She has co-authored many preprint research papers, which claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was actually 'produced' in the laboratory.
5. However, her papers were widely criticised by the international scientific community. For instance, a scientific review by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said that Yan's paper had "contradictory and inaccurate information that does not support their argument."
6. In November 2020, The New York Times reported that Dr Li-Meng Yan was coached to make sensational claims about the virus, thereby creating an anti-China sentiment. The report claimed that Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui made arrangements for her arrival to the United States, and arranged her interviews with conservative media hosts Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson.
7. In her numerous interviews, she has claimed that the Chinese government tried to suppress her research and many other people. This was after she supposedly came to know about the person-to-person transmission of COVID-19, in Dec 2019. She claims that she tried to inform her superiors about the same.
8. However, the Hong Kong University (HKU) refuted these claims, and said that "Dr Yan never conducted any research on the human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus at HKU during December 2019 and January 2020."