Thread by @MischaEDM

Appearing on the title page of the paper is the #RuleofLawFoundation. Bannon is chairman of the Rule of Law Society, one of the foundation’s charities.

Study Claiming Coronavirus is Artificial Linked to #SteveBannon , Chinese Fugitive #GuoWengui.

newsmax.com/t/newsmax/arti…

The theory of a natural origin of the coronavirus “lacks substantial support,” but “the alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory is…  strictly censored on peer-reviewed scientific journals,” according to the study, on Zenodo.

The study’s first author is Yan Limeng, a former University of Hong Kong postdoctoral researcher who has alleged that HKU silenced her when she claimed to have learned early in the pandemic that the coronavirus could be transmitted between people.
HKU has denied the allegations.

The study’s first author is Yan Limeng, a former University of Hong Kong postdoctoral researcher who alleged in July that HKU silenced her when she claimed to have discovered early in the outbreak that the coronavirus could be transmitted between people.

Yan made the allegations on Fox News and claimed she made the discovery three weeks before the Chinese government confirmed human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus on January 20.

💥Three other scientists listed as co-authors on the paper appear to have Chinese names.

Can we trust Chinese scientists?

💥The researchers’ credentials were not included in the study, and there was no explanation of their links to the foundation or their role in the study.

HKU has denied the allegations, saying Yan did not conduct any research on the coronavirus in December or January.

Bannon has identified himself as chairman of the Rule of Law Society, one of the foundation’s constituent charities, which is also named on the paper’s title page.

An analysis in the journal Nature said the virus had none of the hallmarks of genetic engineering.

Yan’s paper said the Nature article was mired by “conflicts of interest” but did not give evidence to support the claims.

It also said the “genomic sequence of Sars-CoV-2 is suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military laboratories in the Third Military Medical University (Chongqing, China) and the Research Institute for Medicine of Nanjing Command (Nanjing, China)”.

Kristian Andersen, first co-author of the Nature article, said on Wednesday that many of the central claims in Yan’s paper were factually inaccurate. Andersen said Sars-Cov-2, the official name of coronavirus, was not “suspiciously similar” to the bat coronavirus Yan referred to.

“This simply can’t be true – there are more than 3,500 nucleotide differences between Sars-CoV-2 and these viruses,” he said.

Andersen also denied Yan’s allegation of conflicts of interest.

“My lab has never received funding from China and we have no collaborations with Chinese investigators. I have no financial interests in China. All our analyses are scientific and unbiased,” he wrote.

Yan has become a frequent guest on right-leaning broadcasters and platforms. On Tuesday, she repeated many of the central allegations in the study on Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, one of the most popular current affairs programmes on US cable television.

Yan also frequently appears on Bannon’s podcast, War Room, and in reports published by a media outlet owned by Guo, repeating her allegations that the virus is engineered.