The Yan Report is a misleading article masquerading as science, which falsely claims that the novel coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab. An example of cloaked science, it was released during a time of intense uncertainty; as scientists raced for answers about COVID-19, sharing unvetted data as preprints in open science repositories became an essential mode of international collaboration. The increasing openness of the scientific community, though, is a vulnerability that can be leveraged by media manipulators, especially during times of crisis. On April 28, 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), fled to the United States with support from Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui. They used Yan’s story — that she was a whistleblower — to exploit the contentious wedge issue of the unknown origin of COVID-19
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Stage 1: Manipulation Campaign Planning and Origins
Within a few weeks of the novel coronavirus spreading from China to the rest of the world, a pernicious narrative began to take root online: the suggestion that the virus SARS-CoV-2 was a biological weapon created in a lab.1
In mid-January 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), gave credence to this idea when she told her favorite YouTuber — Wang Dinggang, a vocal critic of the Chinese government, and close associate of exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui2 — about rumors she had heard about the virus’ origins. Wang repeated the conversations on his channel without naming her “because officials could make the person disappear. ”
STAGE 2: Seeding Campaign Across Social Platforms and Web
All of this publicity put Yan’s name into circulation in the US and primed the public for the next phase of the campaign, which was the release of a preprint scientific paper.31 The paper exploited the vulnerability of open science to further muddy the waters about the origin of COVID-19 and push an anti-CCP narrative. The paper is an example of cloaked science — a discrete piece of scientific-looking misinformation — which gave credibility to conspiracies suggesting that COVID-19 was a bioweapon and that it had been engineered by China.
On September 14, 2020, Yan, along with three other names,32 released a preprint paper on an open-access research data repository called Zenodo. The title of the paper used scientific keywords central to the bioweapon misinformation narrative: “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route.”33 Its entire claim is in its title: COVID-19 was created in a lab. She joined Twitter and tweeted the Zenodo link to her preprint.
In an interview with National Geographic, Dr. Angela Rasumussen, a virologist at Columbia University, explained that Yan’s paper “looks legitimate because they use a lot of technical jargon. But in reality, a lot of what they're saying doesn't really make any sense.”46 Yan’s paper includes graphs, datasets, and cellular models, making it look like she has the evidence to back up her claims.