The engineering of a COVID origin conspiracy

On the 28th of April 2020 Dr. Yan Limeng, a virologist from China, arrived in the United States requesting asylum and claiming to have evidence that COVID-19 was deliberately engineered and released by the Chinese government. She was a legitimate scientist working in the field, having published articles on coronaviruses in reputable journals like The Lancet and Nature. The FBI interrogated her for several hours, and she was then permitted to stay in the US. Her safe passage out of Hong Kong was arranged and paid for by Chinese dissidents in the US allied with Steve Bannon (Breitbart news founder and former chief strategist to President Trump).

Dr. Yan Limeng

Once she was safely in the United States, Yan received media training from her sponsors and went on Fox News and other networks to publicise her explosive claims. A scientist escaping persecution by an authoritarian government revealing a secret plan to kill millions with an engineered virus made for a compelling narrative. So how can a non-expert assess the claim that COVID-19 is a bioweapon?

The claim that COVID-19 was being cultivated as a bioweapon by the Chinese government would require some substantial evidence, but is not outright impossible. There is a long history of militaries using different forms of biological warfare against their enemies. In the Middle Ages, rotting corpses and animal carcases were launched into besieged castles. During the Second World War, Japan dropped cholera and bubonic plague infected fleas on Chinese cities. And during the cold war, both the US and the USSR had biological weapons programs. In the USSR there was even an incident in 1979 when anthrax escaped from a biological weapons facility and killed dozens of people. However, the fact that something isn't impossible doesn't mean we are justified to believe in it.

This article will look at Yan Limeng's claims of COVID as a bioweapon, how it proliferated, and how a non-expert might assess such a claim. It is agnostic on the natural vs. lab leak origins question.

In September 2020 Yan released the first of 3 papers purporting to prove beyond doubt that COVID-19 was deliberately engineered. She intended for it to be hard evidence backing up her claims, rather than people just relying on her testimony and credentials. The articles were all published on Zenodo, a repository open for any researcher to host their research before publication. The article was not peer reviewed, and was not submitted to any reputable scientific journal. As she had done previously in July of 2020, Yan again did a tour of right wing and alternative media promoting her research papers, and has since continued to call them the “smoking gun” proving that the Chinese government created the entire COVID-19 pandemic.

As non-experts, it is unlikely that we would be able to assess the specific scientific claims made in her papers. We lack background knowledge, and are likely to make mistakes in interpretation due to our ignorance. Therefore, the best way for us to have a well-founded opinion is to look at the expert responses to her research, and try to understand whether this is a genuine scientific debate or just a public relations campaign trying to prey on the public's ignorance. While not an absolute proof that the paper is wrong, it is a good heuristic that tends to be right more often than it is wrong.

Virologists and experts who engaged with Yan's paper titled “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route” rejected its conclusions, and criticised her reasoning. A direct response to Yan's report was published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which attempted to provide a comprehensive response to the claims made. The authors state that Yan's paper failed to provide evidence for many of the claims, mischaracterised the data presented and lacked a methods section, and also pointed out that engineering the virus would require a much longer timeframe than was available. They also point out that a military laboratory involved in scientific research “is not in itself suspicious”, because all sorts of non-weapons based scientific research is done in military laboratories. In many countries, including the US and China, there are military labs which have been declared to the Biological Weapons Convention simply to build trust that they are not being used for weapons development. The specific scientific claims made in the response are also not something a non-expert can assess; however, this rebuttal does indicate that Yan's initial scientific justifications may not be as well founded as she presented.

Yan dismissed all criticism of her article, and continued to use American right-wing media and political figures to try to convince the public of her findings. In her September 2020 Tucker Carlson interview, Yan said that her research is being suppressed by the Chinese government, as well as by friends of the Chinese government in the scientific community. As of 10th September 2022, this Tucker Carlson clip on YouTube has 2.7 million views, and has obviously reached a huge audience. The interview was also promoted by Sky News, where they claimed the video was “virtually impossible to find” and implied the Chinese government had taken down Yan's Twitter account.

Steven Bannon coordinated with Trump-aligned Republicans like Peter Navarro (Trump's director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy), Sean Spicer (Trump's former Press Secretary), Rudy Giuliani (Former mayor of New York and lawyer for Trump's election lawsuits) and others to promote Yan and her article. She had an interview with the Trump-aligned congressman Mo Brooks, and also enjoyed the support of congressman Matt Gaetz who questioned the FBI about why her claims were not being accepted. Criticism from the scientific community didn't slow down the spread of the bioweapon origin conspiracy, because it was being promoted and endorsed by Republican activists, politicians and media.

Wang Dinggang and Rudy Giuliani (Steve Bannon and Yan Limeng can be seen in the background)

The people who helped Yan get to the US, Wang Dinggang and Guo Wengui, promoted her conspiracy among the international Chinese diasporas. Wang Dinggang runs a YouTube channel opposing the Chinese government, and was the person Yan contacted to help her escape from Hong Kong. Guo Wengui is a billionaire who left China to escape arrest by the Chinese government, and developed his own online following sharing rumours and making accusations about the private lives of high level CCP officials. Guo paid for Yan's flight to the US, and he has created multiple social media platforms to promote his agenda, including this bioweapon conspiracy. Guo's most influential online platform was his YouTube alternative, called GTV, which allowed users to spread conspiracy content without worrying their videos would be removed.

Guo and Bannon together created a political movement called the New Federal State of China (NFSC), which aimed to unite all Chinese diaspora opponents of the Chinese Communist Party under their banner to become a kind of government in exile. The movement founded groups across the globe, including in New Zealand, to spread conspiracy theories, and the GTV platform became a favourite for New Zealand conspiracy figures.

In New Zealand, conspiracy theorists and fringe political figures like Billy Te Kahika, Jami Lee Ross and Kelvin Alps allied themselves with Guo's New Federal State of China movement and promoted the bioweapon conspiracy theory. The New Zealand branch of the NFSC also had permanent links to Yan's twitter on their home page. Kelvyn Alp hosted his show “Counterspin” on GTV, and has promoted the bioweapon conspiracy. Kelvyn's studio prominently displayed flags of the NFSC alongside the New Zealand flag. Similarly, Jami-Lee Ross appeared on Steve Bannon's show with a background of NZ and NFSC flags promoting Advance NZ. His co-leader of Advance NZ, Billy Te Kahika, promoted the bioweapon conspiracy in his campaign for the Te Tai Tokerau seat. Advance NZ also became the first political party globally to recognise the NFSC as the true government of China, and joined the New Zealand chapter for their protests outside the Chinese Embassy.

In March of 2021 President Biden requested that the US Intelligence Community (IC) investigate and produce a report on all the available evidence around COVID's origins. The Trump administration did not cooperate at all with Biden's transition team, so presumably Biden assumed power in total ignorance of the sources for Trump and his allies' myriad claims about COVID origins. The report was released in August 2021, and the IC completely rejected the bioweapon claims about COVID origins. The authors specifically address and reject the claims of Yan:

“We remain skeptical of allegations that SARS-CoV-2 was a biological weapon because they are supported by scientifically invalid claims, their proponents do not have direct access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), or their proponents are suspected of spreading disinformation.”

“The IC assesses that public claims from a Hong Kong virologist that Beijing created SARS-CoV-2 as a biological weapon are inconsistent with available technical information on coronaviruses. We assess that the articles contain several technical inaccuracies and omit key data points.”

In addition to rejecting the claim as scientifically baseless, the report states that the Chinese government “did not have foreknowledge that SARS-CoV-2 existed before WIV researchers isolated it”. If the Chinese government had developed it, they would be expected to show more awareness of what it was and how urgently to respond to it.

In the end, despite being non-experts, we can reject the bioweapon COVID origin theories as extremely unlikely, and lacking any compelling evidence. Dr. Yan Limeng's initial allegation rested almost entirely on her credibility as a genuine scientist and expert in the field. However, her bioweapon report was never peer reviewed or submitted to reputable journals, and she dismissed offhand any experts who disagreed with it. Instead, it was a cadre of Republican political operatives who catapulted her into the public arena, where she used her scientific credentials and a compelling narrative to try to sway the public. She embraced the Republican cause, and was even present when Steve Bannon was bragging about Trump's plans to fraudulently declare victory in the 2020 election.

After Trump was out of office, the US Intelligence Community stated that they had no evidence or reason to believe COVID was developed as a bioweapon, and that there were good reasons to believe that this wasn't the case. The fact that Yan's papers were developed and promoted globally as part of a global political campaign to discredit and overthrow the Chinese government is a good reason to be skeptical of Yan's original claims.

Unfortunately, as with many conspiracies, the bioweapon conspiracy theory continued to be propagated in 2021, with Republicans in congress questioning the FBI about it, meeting with Yan Limeng and claiming the evidence is “overwhelming”. Yan will still give interviews to any publication that will host her.

As skeptics it can be tempting to get into the specifics of scientific claims in a traditional debunking style. However, that isn't the only way to approach this kind of misinformation, and it also may not be the most effective way to communicate why a theory is wrong to someone else who is a non-expert. All a lay person will hear is claim and counterclaim, with no way to judge which side is more true.

Instead, using this case as an example, it should be sufficient to explain to people how Yan did not do what credible scientists usually do; that science isn't done through Twitter posts and TV appearances, but rather through peer review and publication. And even if the scientific community had just maliciously rejected her, rather than engaging with her ideas seriously, there would still be the question of the US intelligence community. America is not friends with China, but their universal rejection of the idea that COVID was developed as a bioweapon speaks volumes.