The China virus.” The words reach a crescendo as they roll out of President Donald Trump’s mouth, clearly showing his irritation. He is rebranding Covid-19 as the ‘China virus’ and has claimed, without any proof, that he has seen evidence that it was manufactured in China.
Out of the darkness about how the virus left the city of Wuhan and spread across the world, a report from a Chinese virologist who fled to the US has gone viral among the conservative media in the United States. It fits well with Trump’s China virus mantra, which has become one of the mainstays of his reelection campaign.
Is it all too convenient? Does the report stand up to scrutiny?
The report titled “Unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome suggesting sophisticated laboratory modification rather than natural evolution and delineation of its probable synthetic route” is authored by Dr Li-Meng Yan, a virologist who claims to be one of the world’s first scientists to have studied the new coronavirus and to have discovered that it originated in a People’s Liberation Army lab, though the report only alludes to it as a possibility.
Yan fled Hong Kong saying she feared that she would disappear along with her evidence. “I have to hide because I know how they treat whistleblowers. As a whistleblower here I want to tell the truth of Covid-19 and the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” she told Fox News.
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