generalcreatortiger

[generalcreatortiger]

How Steve Bannon and a Chinese Billionaire Created a Right-Wing Coronavirus Media Sensation

Amy QinVivian WangDanny Hakim

By Amy Qin, Vivian Wang and Danny Hakim

Published Nov. 20, 2020

Updated Jan. 26, 2021

Dr. Li-Meng Yan wanted to remain anonymous. It was mid-January, and Dr. Yan, a researcher in Hong Kong, had been hearing rumors about a dangerous new virus in mainland China that the government was playing down. Terrified for her personal safety and career, she reached out to her favorite Chinese YouTube host, known for criticizing the Chinese government.

Within days, the host was telling his 100,000 followers that the coronavirus had been deliberately released by the Chinese Communist Party. He wouldn’t name the whistle-blower, he said, because officials could make the person “disappear.”

By September, Dr. Yan had abandoned caution. She appeared in the United States on Fox News making the unsubstantiated claim to millions that the coronavirus was a bio-weapon manufactured by China.

Overnight, Dr. Yan became a right-wing media sensation, with top advisers to President Trump and conservative pundits hailing her as a hero. Nearly as quickly, her interview was labeled on social media as containing “false information,” while scientists rejected her research as a polemic dressed up in jargon.

Her evolution was the product of a collaboration between two separate but increasingly allied groups that peddle misinformation: a small but active corner of the Chinese diaspora and the highly influential far right in the United States.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan’s interview on Tucker Carlson’s show in September racked up at least 8.8 million views online. Facebook and Instagram flagged it as false information.Credit...Fox News

Each saw an opportunity in the pandemic to push its agenda. For the diaspora, Dr. Yan and her unfounded claims provided a cudgel for those intent on bringing down China’s government. For American conservatives, they played to rising anti-Chinese sentiment and distracted from the Trump administration’s bungled handling of the outbreak.

Both sides took advantage of the dearth of information coming out of China, where the government has refused to share samples of the virus and has resisted a transparent, independent investigation. Its initial cover-up of the outbreak has further fueled suspicion about the origins of the virus.

An overwhelming body of evidence shows that the virus almost certainly originated in an animal, most likely a bat, before evolving to make the leap into humans. While U.S. intelligence agencies have not ruled out the possibility of a lab leak, they have not found any proof so far to back up that theory.

Dr. Yan’s trajectory was carefully crafted by Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire, and Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump.

They put Dr. Yan on a plane to the United States, gave her a place to stay, coached her on media appearances and helped her secure interviews with popular conservative television hosts like Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs, who have shows on Fox. They nurtured her seemingly deep belief that the virus was genetically engineered, uncritically embracing what she provided as proof.

“I said from Day 1, there’s no conspiracies,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview. “But there are also no coincidences.”

Mr. Bannon noted that unlike Dr. Yan, he did not believe the Chinese government “purposely did this.” But he has pushed the theory about an accidental leak of risky laboratory research and has been intent on creating a debate about the new coronavirus’s origins.

“Dr. Yan is one small voice, but at least she’s a voice,” he said.

The media outlets that cater to the Chinese diaspora — a jumble of independent websites, YouTube channels and Twitter accounts with anti-Beijing leanings — have formed a fast-growing echo chamber for misinformation. With few reliable Chinese-language news sources to fact-check them, rumors can quickly harden into a distorted reality. Increasingly, they are feeding and being fed by far-right American media.

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Wang Dinggang, the YouTube host contacted by Dr. Yan and a close associate of Mr. Guo, appears to have been the first to seed rumors related to Hunter Biden, a son of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. A site owned by Mr. Guo amplified the baseless claims about Hunter Biden’s involvement in a child abuse conspiracy. They were picked up by Infowars and other fringe American outlets. Mr. Bannon, Mr. Wang and Mr. Guo are now all promoting the false idea that the presidential election was rigged.

Big technology companies have started to push back, as Facebook and Twitter try to better police content. Twitter permanently banned one of Mr. Bannon’s accounts for violating its rules on glorifying violence after he suggested on his podcast that the heads of the F.B.I. director and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, should be put on pikes.

But such mainstream notoriety has only bolstered their anti-establishment credentials. Mr. Wang’s YouTube following has nearly doubled since January. Traffic for two of Mr. Guo’s websites soared to more than 135 million last month, up from fewer than five million visits last December, according to SimilarWeb, an online data provider. Many conservatives who claim Facebook and Twitter censor right-wing voices are also flocking to new social media platforms such as Parler — and Dr. Yan, Mr. Wang and Mr. Guo have already joined them.

Dr. Yan, through representatives for Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo, declined multiple requests for an interview. So did Mr. Wang, citing The New York Times’s “reputation for fake news.”

In a statement sent through a lawyer, Mr. Guo said he had only offered “encouragement” for Dr. Yan’s efforts “to stand up against the C.C.P. mafia and tell the world the truth about Covid-19.”

As the new year began, Mr. Wang was doing what he did best: attacking the Chinese Communist Party on YouTube. He railed against China’s crackdown on Muslims and pontificated on the U.S. trade war.

Then on Jan. 19, he suddenly shifted to the emerging outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. It was early in the crisis, before the lockdown in the city, before China had disclosed that the virus was spreading among humans, before the world was paying attention.

In an 80-minute show devoted to an unnamed whistle-blower, Mr. Wang said that he had heard from “the world’s absolute top coronavirus expert,” who had told him China was not being transparent. “I think this is very believable, and very scary,” he said.

Wang Dinggang, left, a YouTube host and China critic, and his frequent co-host, known as An Hong. In January, Mr. Wang suddenly shifted his attention to the emerging coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

Wang Dinggang, left, a YouTube host and China critic, and his frequent co-host, known as An Hong. In January, Mr. Wang suddenly shifted his attention to the emerging coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.Credit...YouTube

Mr. Wang, who was a businessman in China before moving to the United States for unknown reasons, is part of a growing group of commentators that have emerged on the Chinese-language internet. Their shows, which mix punditry, serious analysis and outright rumor, cater to a diaspora that often does not trust Chinese state media and has few reliable sources of news in its native language.

Since starting his program several years ago, Mr. Wang, who broadcasts under the name Lu De, has emerged as one of the genre’s most popular personalities, in part for his embrace of outlandish theories. He has accused Chinese officials of using “sex and seduction” to entrap enemies, and urged his audience to hoard food in preparation for the Communist Party’s collapse.

His January show on the unnamed whistle-blower combined the same elements of fact and fiction. He called his source, later revealed to be Dr. Yan, an expert, but greatly exaggerated her credentials.

She had studied influenza before the outbreak, but not coronaviruses. She did work at one of the world’s top virology labs, at the University of Hong Kong, but was fairly new to the field and hired for her experience with lab animals, according to two university employees who knew her. She helped investigate the new outbreak, but was not overseeing the effort.

The episode caught the attention of Mr. Bannon, who said he started worrying about the virus when China began locking down. Someone, he didn’t say who, pointed out the show and translated it.

A few months later, Mr. Wang suddenly told Dr. Yan to flee Hong Kong for her safety, he explained in later broadcasts. Mr. Guo, his primary patron, paid for her to fly first class, he added.

“I’m currently in New York, very safe and relaxed” with the “best bodyguards and lawyers,” Dr. Yan wrote on WeChat, in a screenshot seen by The Times. “What I’m doing now is helping the whole world take control of the pandemic.”

After Dr. Yan arrived in the United States, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Guo and their allies immediately set out to package her as a whistle-blower they could sell to the American public.

They installed her in a “safe house” outside of New York City and hired lawyers, Mr. Bannon said. They found her a media coach, since English is not her first language. Mr. Bannon also asked her to submit multiple papers summarizing her purported evidence, Dr. Yan later said.

“Make sure you can walk people through this logically,” Mr. Bannon recalled telling her.

Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo have been on a mission for years to, as they put it, bring down the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Guo, who also goes by Miles Kwok, was a property magnate in China with ties to senior party officials, until he fled the country about five years ago under the shadow of corruption allegations. He has since styled himself as a freedom fighter, though many are skeptical of his motivations.

Mr. Bannon, who patrolled the South China Sea as a young naval officer, has long focused much of his energy on China. During his time in the White House, he counseled Mr. Trump to take a tough approach toward the country, which he has described as “the greatest existential threat ever faced by the United States.”

Mr. Guo’s deep pockets and Mr. Bannon’s extensive network have given them an influential platform. The two men set up a $100 million fund to investigate corruption in China. They spread conspiracy theories about the accidental death of a Chinese tycoon in France, calling it a fake suicide orchestrated by Beijing.

Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon at a news conference in 2018. Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo have been on a mission for years to, as they put it, bring down the Chinese Communist Party.

Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon at a news conference in 2018. Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo have been on a mission for years to, as they put it, bring down the Chinese Communist Party.Credit...Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Bannon pivoted his podcast to the coronavirus. He was calling it “the C.C.P. virus” long before Mr. Trump started using xenophobic labels for the pandemic. He invited fierce critics of China to the show to discuss how the outbreak exemplified the global threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Guo began claiming that the virus was an attack ordered by China’s vice president. He circulated the same claims on his media operation, which includes GTV, a video platform, and GNews, a site that features glowing coverage of Mr. Guo and his associates. He released a song called “Take Down the C.C.P.,” which briefly hit No. 1 worldwide on the Apple iTunes chart.

The men have continued to target the Chinese government even as they battle their own legal woes. Mr. Guo is reportedly under investigation by U.S. federal authorities over fund-raising tactics at his media company. Mr. Bannon, who was arrested this summer on Mr. Guo’s yacht, is facing fraud charges for a nonprofit he helped set up to build a wall along the Mexican border.

In Dr. Yan, the two men found an ideal face for their campaign.

On July 10, she revealed her identity for the first time in a 13-minute interview on the Fox News website. She said that the Chinese government had concealed evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus. She accused, without proof, professors at the University of Hong Kong of assisting in the cover-up. (The university quickly rejected her accusations as “hearsay.”)

“The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of Covid-19,” she said.

She made no mention of Mr. Guo or Mr. Bannon, by design.

“Don’t link yourself to Bannon, don’t link yourself to Guo Wengui,” Mr. Guo on his own show recounted telling Dr. Yan. “Once you mention us, those American extreme leftists will attack and say you have a political agenda.”

After the first Fox interview, Dr. Yan embarked on a whirlwind tour of right-wing media, echoing conservative talking points. She said that she took hydroxychloroquine to ward off the virus, even though the F.D.A. had warned that it was not effective. She suggested that the World Health Organization helped cover up the outbreak.

Those interviews were amplified by social media accounts proclaiming allegiance to Mr. Guo. They translated her appearances into Chinese, then posted multiple versions on YouTube and retweeted posts by other pro-Guo accounts.

Some of the accounts have tens of thousands of followers — of a dubious nature. Many have multiple indicators of so-called inauthentic behavior, according to an analysis by First Draft, a nonprofit that studies misinformation. The analysis found that they were created in the past two years, lacked background photos and had user names that were jumbles of letters and numbers.

Collectively, the followers created online momentum for the conservative media world, which in turn re-energized the pro-Guo accounts. “The two are filtering and feeding off of each other,” said Anne Kruger, First Draft’s Asia Pacific director.

In early September, Dr. Yan met with Dr. Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University who had floated the possibility that the virus was the product of a laboratory experiment. Dr. Lucey said Dr. Yan’s associates, who set up the meeting, wanted to find a credible scientist to endorse her claims. “That was the only reason for bringing me there,” he said.

For more than four hours, Dr. Yan discussed her background and research, while one of her associates, whom Dr. Lucey declined to name, impatiently walked in and out of the room. He said that Dr. Yan appeared to genuinely believe that the virus had been weaponized but struggled to explain why.

At the end, the associate asked Dr. Lucey if he thought Dr. Yan had a “smoking gun.” When Dr. Lucey said no, the meeting quickly ended.

Days later, Dr. Yan released a 26-page research paper that she said proved the virus was manufactured. It spread rapidly online.

The paper, which was not peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, was posted on an online open-access repository. It was backed by two nonprofits funded by Mr. Guo. The three other co-authors on the paper were pseudonyms for safety reasons, according to Mr. Bannon.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Among the unsubstantiated claims that have circulated about the coronavirus is that it originated in a Chinese laboratory.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Among the unsubstantiated claims that have circulated about the coronavirus is that it originated in a Chinese laboratory.Credit...Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Virologists quickly dismissed the paper as “pseudoscience” and “based on conjecture.” Some worried that the paper — laden with charts and scientific jargon, such as “unique furin cleavage site” and “RBM-hACE2 binding” — would lend her claims a veneer of credibility.

“It’s full of science-y sorts of terms that are jumbled together to sound impressive but aren’t supported,” said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University who was among several authors of a rebuttal to Dr. Yan’s report.

Other misinformation about the pandemic has also emphasized supposed expertise. In the spring, a 26-minute video that went viral featured a discredited American scientist accusing hospitals of inflating virus-related deaths. A July video showed people in white coats, calling themselves “America’s doctors” and suggesting that masks were ineffective; the video was removed by social media platforms for sharing false information.

On Sept. 15, a day after her report was published, Dr. Yan secured her biggest stage yet: an appearance with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Mr. Carlson’s popular show has frequently served as an influential megaphone for the right.

Mr. Carlson asked if Dr. Yan believed Chinese officials had released the virus intentionally or by accident. Dr. Yan did not hesitate.

Footage of their interview racked up at least 8.8 million views online, even though Facebook and Instagram flagged it as false information. High-profile conservatives, including Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, shared it on Twitter. When the Rev. Franklin Graham, the evangelist supporter of Mr. Trump, posted about Dr. Yan on Facebook, it became the most-shared link posted by a U.S.-based Facebook account that day.

Lou Dobbs, another Fox host, tweeted a video of himself and a guest discussing Dr. Yan’s “great case.” Mr. Trump retweeted it.

Dr. Yan was welcomed by an audience already primed to hear her claims. A March poll found that nearly 30 percent of Americans believed the virus was most likely made in a lab.

“Once Tucker Carlson picks it up, it’s not fringe anymore,” said Yotam Ophir, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies disinformation. “It’s now mainstream.”

Weeks later, Mr. Carlson said on his show that he could not endorse Dr. Yan’s theories. Regardless, he welcomed her back as a guest to detail her latest claim: Her mother, she told him, had been arrested by the Chinese government.

The Chinese government often punishes critics by harassing their families. But when The Times reached Dr. Yan’s mother on her cellphone in October, she said that she had never been arrested and was desperate to connect with her daughter, whom she had not spoken to in months.

She declined to say more and asked not to be named, citing fears that Dr. Yan was being manipulated by her new allies.

“They are blocking our daughter from talking to us,” her mother said, referring to Mr. Guo and Mr. Wang. “We want our daughter to know that she can video-chat with us at any time.”

Amy Chang Chien contributed research.

[generalcreatortiger]

Scientists said claims about China creating the coronavirus were misleading. They went viral anyway.

Craig Timberg

Feb. 13, 2021 at 7:48 a.m. GMT+8

Scientists from Johns Hopkins, Columbia and other leading American universities moved with rare speed when a Chinese virologist, Li-Meng Yan, published an explosive paper in September claiming that China had created the deadly coronavirus in a research lab.

The paper, the American scientists concluded, was deeply flawed. And a new online journal from MIT Press — created specifically to vet claims related to SARS-CoV-2 — reported Yan’s claims were “at times baseless and are not supported by the data” 10 days after she posted them.

But in an age when anyone can publish anything online with a few clicks, this response was not fast enough to keep Yan’s disputed allegations from going viral, reaching an audience in the millions on social media and Fox News. It was a development, according to experts on misinformation, that underscored how systems built to advance scientific understanding can be used to spread politically charged claims dramatically at odds with scientific consensus.

Yan’s work, which was posted to the scientific research repository Zenodo without any review on Sept. 14, exploded on Twitter, YouTube and far-right websites with the help of such conservative influencers as Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who repeatedly pushed it on his online show “War Room: Pandemic,” according to a report published Friday by Harvard researchers studying media manipulation. Yan expanded her claims, on Oct. 8, to blame the Chinese government explicitly for developing the coronavirus as a “bioweapon.”

Online research repositories have become key forums for revelation and debate about the pandemic. Built to advance science more nimbly, they have been at the forefront of reporting discoveries about masks, vaccines, new coronavirus variants and more. But the sites lack protections inherent to the traditional — and much slower — world of peer-reviewed scientific journals, where articles are published only after they have been critiqued by other scientists. Research shows papers posted to online sites also can be hijacked to fuel conspiracy theories.

Yan’s paper on Zenodo — despite several blistering scientific critiques and widespread news coverage of its alleged flaws — now has been viewed more than 1 million times, probably making it the most widely read research on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Harvard misinformation researchers. They concluded that online scientific sites are vulnerable to what they called “cloaked science,” efforts to give dubious work “the veneer of scientific legitimacy.”

“They’re many years behind in realizing the capacity of this platform to be abused,” said Joan Donovan, research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which produced the report. “At this point, everything open will be exploited.”

Yan, who previously was a postdoctoral fellow at Hong Kong University but fled to the United States in April, agreed in an interview with The Washington Post that online scientific sites are vulnerable to abuse, but she rejected the argument that her story is a case study in this problem.

Rather, Yan said, she is a dissident trying to warn the world about what she says is China’s role in creating the coronavirus. She used Zenodo, with its ability to instantly publish information without restrictions, because she feared the Chinese government would obstruct publication of her work. Her academic critics, she argued, will be proven wrong.

“None of them can rebut from real, solid, scientific evidence,” Yan said. “They can only attack me.”

Zenodo acknowledged that the furor has prompted reforms, including the posting of a label Thursday above Yan’s paper saying, “Caution: Potentially Misleading Contents” after The Washington Post asked whether Zenodo would remove it. The site also prominently features links to critiques from a Georgetown University virologist and the MIT Press.

“We take misinformation really seriously, so it is something that we want to address,” said Anais Rassat, a spokeswoman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates Zenodo as a general purpose scientific site. “We don’t think taking down the report is the best solution. We want it to stay and indicate why experts think it’s wrong.”

But mainstream researchers who watched Yan’s claims race across the Internet far more quickly than they could counter them have been left troubled by the experience — newly convinced that the capacity for spreading misinformation goes far beyond the big-name social media sites. Any online platform without robust and potentially expensive safeguards is equally vulnerable.

“This is similar to the debate we’re having with Facebook and Twitter. To what degree are we creating an instrument that speeds disinformation, and to what extent are you contributing to that?” said Stefano M. Bertozzi, editor in chief of the MIT Press online journal “Rapid Reviews: COVID-19,” which challenged Yan’s claims.

Bertozzi added, “Most scientists have no interest in getting in a pissing match in cyberspace.”

Catch up on the most important developments in the pandemic with our coronavirus newsletter. All stories in it are free to access.

Coronavirus fuels prominence of online science sites

Online scientific sites have been growing for more than a decade, becoming a vital part of the ecosystem for making and vetting claims across numerous academic fields, but their growth has been supercharged by the urgency of disseminating new discoveries about a deadly pandemic.

Some of the best-known of these sites, such as medRxiv and bioRxiv, have systems for rapid evaluation intended to avoid publishing work that doesn’t pass an initial sniff test of scientific credibility. They also reject papers that only review the work of others or that make such major claims that they shouldn’t be publicized before peer review can be conducted, said Richard Sever, co-founder of medRxiv and bioRxiv.

“We want to create a hurdle that’s high enough that people have to do some research,” Sever said. “What we don’t want to be is a place where there’s a whole bunch of conspiracy theories.”

Online publishing sites generally are called “preprint servers” because many researchers use them as a first step toward traditional peer review, giving the authors a way to make their work public — and available for possible news coverage — before more thorough analysis begins. Advocates of preprint servers tout their ability to create early visibility for important discoveries and also spark useful debate. They note that traditional peer-reviewed journals have their own history of occasionally publishing hoaxes and bad science.

“It’s very funny that everyone is worrying about preprints given that, collectively, journals are not doing a great job of keeping misinformation out,” Sever said.

After Wuhan mission on pandemic origins, WHO team dismisses lab leak theory

He and other proponents, however, acknowledge risks.

While scientists debate — and sometimes refute — flawed claims by one another, nonscientists also scan preprint servers for data that might appear to bolster their pet conspiracy theories.

A research team led by computer scientist Jeremy Blackburn has tracked the appearance of links to preprints from social media sites, such as 4chan, popular with conspiracy theorists. Blackburn and a graduate student, Satrio Yudhoatmojo, found more than 4,000 references on 4chan to papers on major preprint servers between 2016 and 2020, with the leading subjects being biology, infectious diseases and epidemiology. He said the uneven review process has “lent an air of credibility” to preprints that experts might quickly spot as flawed but ordinary people wouldn’t.

“That’s where the risk is,” said Blackburn, an assistant professor at Binghamton University. “Papers from the preprint servers show up in a variety of conspiracy theories … and are misinterpreted wildly because these people aren’t scientists.”

Jessica Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, a nonprofit group that pushes for more transparency and wider use of preprint servers, said they rely on something akin to crowdsourcing, in which comments from outside researchers quickly can identify flaws in work, but she acknowledged vulnerabilities based on the extent of review by server staff and advisers. A recent survey by ASAPbio found more than 50 preprint servers operating — and nearly as many review policies.

And the survey didn’t include Zenodo, which, Polka said, should not be considered a preprint server given its broader mission. Rather, she said, it’s an online repository that happens to host some preprints, as well as conference slides, raw data and other “scientific objects” that anyone with an email address can simply upload. Zenodo has none of the vetting common to major preprint servers and isn’t organized to easily surface critiques or conflicting research, she said.

“Without that kind of context, a preprint server is even more vulnerable to the spread of disinformation,” Polka said. But she added, in general, “Preprint servers do not have the resources to be arbiters of whether something is true or not.”

Yan defends her work

Yan said in her interview with The Post that Zenodo’s openness is what drove her decision to use the site. She had initially submitted her paper to bioRxiv because as a researcher whose work has appeared in Nature, the Lancet Infectious Diseases and other traditional publications, she knew that this preprint server would appear more legitimate to other scientists.

Trump pardons Steve Bannon after ugly falling out early in his presidency

Yan has a medical degree from Xiangya Medical College of Central South University and a PhD in ophthalmology from Southern Medical University — both in China — and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, she said. That university announced she was no longer affiliated with it in July, following an initial appearance on Fox News, saying in a statement that her claim about the origin of the coronavirus “has no scientific basis but resembles hearsay.”

After she fled Hong Kong, she harbored deep suspicions about that government’s potential to block publication of her work, she said. When she checked bioRxiv 48 hours after making her submission, the site appeared to have gone offline, Yan said. Fearing the worst, she withdrew the paper and uploaded it to Zenodo.

Sever, the bioRxiv co-founder, said he could not comment on an individual submission but said that, despite occasional glitches, he was aware of no “prolonged outage” on the site during mid-September and no sign that the Chinese, or anyone else, had hacked it.

For Yan’s paper on Zenodo, she did not list an academic affiliation, as is customary for research. Instead, she listed the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation, which are New York-based nonprofit groups founded by exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a close associate of Bannon, who in 2018 was announced as chairman of the Rule of Law Society. When Bannon was arrested on fraud charges in August, he was aboard Guo’s 150-foot yacht, off the coast of Connecticut. (President Donald Trump last month pardoned Bannon, his former campaign chairman and White House chief strategist).

Chinese dissidents say they’re being harassed by a businessman with links to Steve Bannon

Yan said she listed the Rule of Law entities out of respect for what she said was their work helping dissidents in China, and that they paid for her flight from Hong Kong and provided a resettlement stipend while she largely lives off her savings. She said her work is independent, and she rejected notions that Bannon was helping her spread political claims.

“I didn’t know he was so controversial when I was in Hong Kong,” Yan told The Post.

On Sept. 15, the day after Yan’s paper appeared on Zenodo, she was a guest on Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” an appearance watched by 4.8 million broadcast viewers and 2.8 million on YouTube, and that also generated extensive engagement on Facebook and Twitter, according to the Harvard researchers. Bannon appeared on Carlson’s show that same week and discussed Yan’s claims. He also interviewed her on “War Room: Pandemic” 22 times last year, both before and after the Zenodo publication.

The political context was obvious in the midst of a hotly contested election in which Trump was attacking Democratic rival Joe Biden for supposedly being overly sympathetic to the Chinese government, dubbing him “Beijing Joe.” Republicans, including White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, pushed Yan’s paper along with the hashtag #CCPLiedPeopleDied, a reference to the Chinese Communist Party.

Archives showed the paper had more than 150,000 views on its first day on Zenodo — spectacular reach for a scientific paper, especially one that had not yet been reviewed by any independent experts.

But this surge of attention also generated backlash, including critical news reports by National Geographic and others, raising serious questions about Yan’s claims.

In the academic world, the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins issued a point-by-point response one week after Yan’s paper appeared on Zenodo, raising 39 individual issues in what it said was “objective analysis of details included in the report, as would be customary in a peer-review process.”

A few days later, the MIT Press online journal “Rapid Reviews: COVID-19” featured four scathing reviews, including one from Robert Gallo, a renowned AIDS researcher and a titan within the field of virology.

He labeled Yan’s work “misleading” and cited “questionable, spurious, and fraudulent claims.” Most points were highly technical, but Gallo also questioned her logic regarding the alleged role in creating the coronavirus for the Chinese military, which Gallo noted would be vulnerable to covid-19.

“And how would the Chinese protect themselves?” Gallo asked in his review. “Well, according to the paper, the military knew it could be stopped by remdesivir,” a drug later shown to have some benefit in treating covid-19 while not necessarily reducing the risk of death. “I would surely not want to be in the Chinese military if they were that naive.”

The idea to recruit Gallo came from Bertozzi, the journal’s editor and dean emeritus of the School of Public Health at University of California at Berkeley. Like Gallo, Bertozzi had worked extensively in AIDS research. After seeing Yan’s appearance on Fox, he was eager to use the online journal founded only months earlier to correct the scientific record.

“I felt it needed to be quickly debunked by people with scientific credibility,” Bertozzi said.

He soon thought of Gallo.

“We need somebody of your stature to say this is garbage science,” Bertozzi recalled telling him.

The reviews by Gallo and three other scientists also came with an editor’s note raising questions about the preprint process itself, saying, “While pre-print servers offer a mechanism to disseminate world-changing scientific research at unprecedented speed, they are also a forum through which misleading information can instantaneously undermine the international scientific community’s credibility, destabilize diplomatic relationships, and compromise global safety.”

But these public rebukes from some of the biggest names in virology did not deter Yan. Nor did a detailed report on Oct. 21 by CNN quoting her critics and documenting flaws.

Yan declined to be interviewed for that story, she said, because CNN did not allow her to address the issues they unearthed, point by point, on live television.

Instead, she published her own response on Nov. 21, on Zenodo, titled, “CNN Used Lies and Misinformation to Muddle the Water on the Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

In her Post interview, Yan acknowledged — as CNN had reported — that her three co-authors on the original Sept. 14 paper were pseudonyms, used to protect what she said were other Chinese researchers whose families remain in peril back in China. Authors are typically discouraged from using false names in academic work.

Her claims suffered another blow this week, when a World Health Organization team sent to China to investigate the origins of the pandemic issued a statement saying it was “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus came from a lab.

One of Yan’s earliest vocal critics, virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was at Columbia when Yan’s paper first spread, agreed with WHO’s assessment but did not rule out the possibility — however unlikely — of laboratory origin for the coronavirus. But she said the argument lacks concrete evidence.

“There needs to be a lot less speculation and a lot more investigation,” said Rasmussen, now an affiliate at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. “It takes a really long time to figure this stuff out... This is going to take years or even decades to solve it, if we ever do.”

Yet Yan continues to double down on her claims and to attack her critics as spreading “lies.” She still argues that the Chinese government intentionally created the coronavirus and continues to do everything it can to silence her.

Yan also offers no apologies for making common cause with Bannon and other Trump allies. As a dissident, she said, she doesn’t necessarily get her choice of supporters.

“If China is going to do this crime, who can hold them accountable?… Trump was the one who was tough” against China, Yan said, adding that her claim “is about real fact. I don’t want to mislead people.”

Even now, she is preparing another paper, nearing 30 pages, that she hopes will refute her critics and bring fresh attention to her claims about China, covid-19 and what she says is an international coverup campaign.

Yan plans to publish it in a few weeks, she said — on Zenodo.