The Wuhan lab and China's loose woman
Sept 12, 2020
MY ATTENTION is drawn to an article in the right-wing rabble-rousing Murdoch rag The New York Post, which concerns a Loose Women interview with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who claims to have the scientific evidence required to prove that the coronavirus behind COVID-19 was made in a lab.
The wet market, Yan says, was a “smokescreen”. She said she got her “intelligence from the CDC in China, from the local doctors”, though it isn’t clear what particular “intelligence” she is talking about.
Yan is from Qingdao but worked in the Hong Kong University School of Public Health before fleeing to the United States, where she is now “in hiding”. She has already been doing the rounds among right-wing media outlets. In an interview with Fox News back in July she accused the Chinese of covering up the initial outbreak and playing down its infectivity. Her early conversations with doctors and CDC staff in Wuhan revealed that this was a public health disaster in the making and that many people were too afraid to speak out about how dangerous this new virus was, but she was told by her superior in Hong Kong to keep a lid on what she had found.
This is all well within the bounds of what we know about the last two weeks of December and the early weeks of January: a cover-up is not only plausible, but it is also very likely, given the dynamics of China’s political system and the reluctance of local governments to do anything that might rock the boat.
But suddenly, on Loose Women of all places, Yan goes a step further by blaming the Wuhan Institute of Virology for unleashing SARS-CoV-2, which she claims (much to the surprise of her interviewer Christine Lampard) was a modified version of “the bat coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21”. “Based on that, after hypermodification (it) becomes the novel coronavirus,” she says. “It comes from the lab, the lab in Wuhan, and the lab is controlled by the China government.”
Is Yan a credible source? I have no reason to believe that she isn’t, but a daytime TV chat show seems an odd sort of forum to make such an explosive revelation. And it seems strange that she wasn’t making these allegations earlier.
All we can say for sure is that Yan doesn’t know first hand that it came from a lab. The ”evidence” she talks about seems to be based on “genome sequences”, which doesn’t sound much different from some of the other claims that have been circulating over the past few months, some of which have come from apparently credible scientists.
The idea is usually that the composition of the virus and its amazing ability to bind with the human ACE2 receptor suggests it has been subject to artificial “gain of function” enhancements. Most scientists still think it is unlikely to have come from a lab, and that its component parts - including the receptor binding domain - remain consistent with what has already been found in nature. Could it be that Yan and her collaborators have found something that no one else has found? We await fresh developments.
