Chinese virologist on the run claims Covid virus manufactured in Wuhan lab

A Chinese virologist who has allegedly fled China claims that she has proof that the SARS-Cov-2 virus is in fact man-made in a Wuhan lab.

The new novel coronavirus outbreak was first reported in Wuhan, and was traced back to the sea-food market, which soon became the hotspot and was considered to be the origin centre, where a virus jumped from a bat or a pangolin onto humans.

In April, a French Nobel prize winning scientist Luc Montagnier had also sparked a row by making the same claim.

Speaking on ITV’s ‘Loose Women’, Dr Li-Meng Yan, who is described as “a scientist who was working at the Hong Kong School of Public Health when she turned whistleblower on the Chinese government after she alleged they knew about the spread of the coronavirus before publicly acknowledging the Covid outbreak.”

The description refers to Dr Li’s claims that she had to flee to the US for her own safety and “is now determined to spread her findings to the world”. She is said to have joined the ‘Loose Women’ from a secret location.

Dr Li said while working at Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, her supervisor first asked her to investigate a new ‘SARS-like’ virus in Wuhan on December 31, but her efforts were later “stifled”.

She said she reported back that cases appeared to be rising exponentially but was told to “keep silent and be careful.”

She also said she has proof that the virus came from a virology lab in the city and not from the wet-food market. “The genome sequence is like a human fingerprint,” she says on YouTube.

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“Based on this you can identify these things. I will (use this) evidence to tell people why this has come from the lab in China, why they are the ones who made it,” she says. “Anyone, even if you have no biology knowledge, will be able to read it, and check and identify and verify it yourself.”

She said the Chinese authorities began to discredit her even before she fled the country. “They deleted all my information and also they told people to spread rumours about me,” she said. The Chinese National Health Commission, World Health Organization and University Of Hong Kong disputed her claims, according to The Sun.

In July, Hong Kong University put out a statement: “Dr Yan Limeng was a postdoctoral fellow at HKU. She has left the University. 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.”

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In March, a paper in science journal on the proximal origins of Covid-19 found that “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

Early this year, a Chinese doctor Li Wenliang died after contracting the virus while treating patients in Wuhan. Last December he sent a message to fellow medics warning of a virus he thought looked like Sars — another deadly coronavirus.

But he was told by police to “stop making false comments” and was investigated for “spreading rumours”.

“I don’t think he was rumour-mongering. Hasn’t this turned into reality now?” his father, Li Shuying, had told BBC. “My son was wonderful.”