Li-Meng Yan or Limeng Yan, is a Chinese virologist and whistleblower who rose to prominence for her accusations against the Mainland Chinese government that it knew about the coronavirus much earlier than it publicly said that it did.
Yan says she was one of the first scientists in the world to study the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, after Dr. Leo Poon, her supervisor at the Hong Kong University, asked her to look into a cluster of SARS-like cases in Wuhan, in December 2019. According to Fox, Yan maintained an extensive network of medical professionals from mainland China, one of whom told Yan about human-to-human transmission of the novel disease on December 31, 2019.. According to Yan, she reported her findings about the virus multiple times to her superiors, including one on January 16, after which she says she was warned by her supervisor "to keep silent and be careful." In interviews with Fox News, Yan accused the Chinese government of knowing about the novel coronavirus before it publicly said that it did and said that lives could have been saved if they had not censored her work. She also accused her supervisors for ignoring research that she was doing at the onset of the pandemic that she says could have also saved lives. Feeling that she and her colleagues had an obligation to tell the world of their research given their status as a World Health Organization reference laboratory, Yan fled for the United States on April 28 with what she said was her intention of delivering "the message of the truth of COVID," adding if she tried to tell her story in China, she said that she would be "disappeared and killed." Yan's interviews and accusations were subsequently cited in other media outlets. In July 2020, a press release from the University of Hong Kong denied her claim and stated that "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. We further observe that what she might have emphasised in the reported interview has no scientific basis but resembles hearsay." She co-authored a paper called "Pathogenesis and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in golden hamsters", published in May 2020, regarding transmission of the virus in hamsters. This paper was co-authored by her now former colleagues at HKU.
