Thread by @MischaEDM

What are my favorite felons up to ?

After being rejected by HongKong people, the fraudster duet launched the project #YanLiMeng!

The American science community is in an uproar. A bunch of liars and felons is running a show!

A new study purporting to show that the novel coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab was published by a pair of nonprofit groups linked to Steve Bannon, the former top Trump strategist now facing felony fraud charges.
#YanLiMeng

The study is the work of the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, sister nonprofit organizations that Bannon was instrumental in creating.

According to documents posted on the Society’s website last year, he served as that group’s chair.

The Bannon connection was first spotted by Kevin Bird, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, and shared by Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, who called the study “bizarre and unfounded.”

A search of Google Scholar and the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation websites indicates that the organizations have not previously published scientific or medical research, and it’s unclear whether the paper received any peer review.

Only asking for donations!

It was posted on Monday on the website Zenodo, a publicly available repository of scientific and academic research to which anyone can upload their work.

Both of the nonprofits behind the study were formed in conjunction with exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.

https://twitter.com/MischaEDM/status/1305555118444572674

Bannon has collaborated with Guo on a number of advocacy efforts targeting the Chinese government and business endeavors that have drawn the scrutiny of federal law enforcement officials!

In July, Bannon appeared to tease scientific studies supporting his contention that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. He told the Daily Mail that scientists from the lab had “defected” to the U.S. and were collaborating with American intelligence agencies.

Bannon has been working hard on #YanliMeng.

Bannon has hosted others who have speculated that the virus may have been a Chinese “bioweapon,” but he has said that he believes the most plausible explanation is that it “came out of experiments that were going on” at that Wuhan lab.

The study published by Bannon’s group on Monday is therefore particularly incendiary. “This virus is not from nature,” declared Dr. Li-Meng Yan, one of the scientists who conducted the study, during a Monday appearance on a British talk show, “Loose Women🤣”.

She called reports that the virus originated in a Wuhan meat market “a smoke screen” designed to obscure its true origins.

But other virologists disagree and say the paper makes false claims about a number of basic facts.

( She is no virologist! She did not flee HK!)

“Basically, it's all circumstantial and some of it is entirely fictional,” Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, told The Daily Beast of the study.

The paper leads with a claim that the coronavirus' genes are "suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military laboratories" in China—an assertion Rasmussen says shouldn’t be surprising because “they are related SARS-like coronaviruses.”

The study’s authors made a similar claim about a portion of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein—which viruses use to breach and infect cells—and wrote that it’s similar to the original SARS virus in a “suspicious manner” and suggests genetic manipulation. “

SARS-CoV also used ACE2 as a cellular receptor, as do other SARS-like bat coronaviruses,” Rasmussen says. “It is not suspicious and is in fact expected that the receptor binding domains that bind the same protein would be similar.”

Rasmussen also said that the paper misrepresented basic facts about another part of coronavirus spike proteins known as furin cleavage sites. The authors claim that SARS-CoV-2’s cleavage site is “unique” and unseen elsewhere in nature.

But according to Rasmussen, “Furin cleavage sites occur naturally in many other beta-CoVs, including MERS-CoV and other SARS-like bat coronaviruses.”

https://twitter.com/mischaedm/status/1305746745431715840

Yan has said that she fled China to avoid reprisals from the government there over her allegations that it was not being forthcoming about the origin and nature of the virus.

(She took a commercial flight Cathay Airlines from HK to LAX. All smooth, CCP did not stop her!)

The University of Hong Kong’s school of public health, where Yan was employed, has disputed her allegations that the university failed to heed her warnings prior to the outbreak in China.

https://twitter.com/mischaedm/status/1305922878458585088

In August, Yan appeared on Bannon’s podcast. During that show, Bannon said that he was “still not in the camp that believes they purposely let it out but I’ve been strongly in the camp from the beginning that it came out of the Wuhan P4 lab.”

( come on Bannon u old 🦊)

Yan appeared on Fox Carlson's on Tuesday. After Yan reiterated her claims that the virus was developed in a lab and that 🇨🇳 government released it intentionally, Carlson who has become one of Fox's loudest coronavirus skeptics offered up a big caveat at the end of the interview.

not the forum for the details of your research, I don’t have the grounding to ask you the right questions but this is where you wish for a functioning media because what you just said completely changes everything we think we know about the pandemic that is wrecking our country

On Thursday, Facebook included a warning on top of a video from the segment posted to Carlson's Facebook page. The video, according to the warning, "repeats information about COVID-19 that independent fact-checkers say is false."

So who is the virologist?
#SteveBannon ?

In a separate post, Carlson hit back at the social media company. "This is censorship, and we will be addressing it on our show tonight," he wrote.

Hahaha! Tucker, the Sucker!

thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-l…