The Fraudulent Story of Dr. Li-Meng Yan, the Original Lab Leak Whistleblower

Posing as a whistleblower exposing Chinese malfeasance, Yan concealed her deep ties to the U.S. biomedical establishment. Both her supporters and critics in the media played along with the deception.

In July, 2020, amid suffocating lockdowns and an unprecedented fear campaign on the basis of a viral pandemic, Dr. Li-Meng Yan burst onto the U.S. media scene. She presented herself as a whistleblower who had fled China to reveal a chilling truth: that SARS-CoV-2 was not a naturally occurring virus, but a genetically engineered bioweapon created and released by the Chinese government.

“The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of COVID,” she told Fox News on July 10, warning that the Chinese Communist Party would kill her for speaking out.

However, as this investigation will reveal, Yan has consistently left out key details of her personal and professional history that would undermine her image as a whistleblower and outsider to U.S. politics.

Overnight, Yan became a sensation. Her narrative – that China, America’s top geopolitical rival, had unleashed a pathogen on the world and – was eagerly embraced by media outlets and political influencers.

But behind her dramatic claims lay a web of deception, half-truths, and omitted connections. Far from being a rogue scientist risking her life to expose wrongdoing, Yan was embedded in elite biomedical networks, spent years working under two of the key virologists who shaped the earliest narrative surrounding COVID-19, married into a prominent U.S. virology family, and was promoted by figures at the center of a regime-change information war against China.

Her rise was not a tale of truth-telling. It was a political operation – one side of a dialectical propaganda campaign that convinced Americans a novel virus was rampaging across the country, justified sweeping lockdowns and emergency measures, and redirected blame toward a foreign adversary while radically restructuring society and social relations, and consolidating power and wealth.

In short: the whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan was not exposing the machine – she was part of it.

Embedded in the Biomedical Establishment

Before the COVID era began, Yan was conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Hong Kong under Dr. Leo Poon at the World Health Organization’s designated reference laboratory for SARS.

Poon was no ordinary doctor. A virologist trained at Oxford, he and his longtime collaborator Dr. Malik Peiris have been central figures in identifying what are claimed to be pandemic viruses and crafting the official biomedical response to them. Peiris is credited with isolating the original SARS coronavirus in 2003 and was among the earliest researchers involved with SARS-CoV-2. Together, he and Poon developed PCR tests that were adopted by the WHO as a diagnostic tool despite that they were not specific to SARS-CoV-2. Both Peiris and Poon are also deeply involved in vaccine development, and Peiris was influential in shaping global policy as an advisor to the WHO International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on COVID‑19.

They were also deeply involved in vaccine research. In 2018, Yan, Poon, and Peiris co-authored a paper advocating for a universal influenza vaccine to counter what they described as "unpredictable outbreaks.”

This context – that Yan was not a lone rebel but part of the inner circle of establishment virology – was conspicuously absent from her media narrative.

The Myth of the Chinese Defector

According to a July 10, 2020, Fox News article, Poon asked Yan to discreetly investigate a mysterious cluster of SARS-like cases in Wuhan in late 2019. Yan claimed she contacted a scientist at the Chinese CDC who informed her of human-to-human transmission. When she shared this with Poon, she says, he urged her to remain silent.

"As he warned me before: 'Don't touch the red line,'" Yan claimed. “We will get in trouble and we'll be disappeared.”

She also accused Peiris of turning a blind eye to the viral outbreak.

Yan says she then contacted Wang Dinggang, a Chinese billionaire turned U.S.-based YouTuber and regime-change advocate who broadcasts under the name Lu De. On January 19, 2020, Lu De repeated Yan’s claims, accusing the Chinese government of covering up a lab origin of the virus.

Yan alleges that Lu De warned her that her life was in danger. Her husband, she says, discovered her communications, became enraged, and demanded she stop. She claims she fled China alone on April 28, 2020, narrowly escaping death.

This is the official origin story, which has gone unchallenged by both her supporters and critics, but is rife with glaring omissions and outright fabrications that leave no doubt to her role as a covert political operative rather than a whistleblower scientist.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Family Ties to U.S. Government Science

Although she portrayed herself as a recent defector, Yan had been in the United States years earlier. Public records show she married Ranawaka Arachchige Prasad Mahendra Perera (Ranawaka APM Perera) in Manhattan in New York City in 2014. Perera, a Sri Lankan who shifted from dentistry to virology, and has been funded by the Department of Defense, now works as a virologist and infectious disease researcher for the Department of Veteran Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania.

More revealingly, his parents are high-ranking figures in the U.S. biomedical bureaucracy. His father, Dr. Liyanage P. Perera, has been a longtime senior researcher at the National Cancer Institute. His mother, Dr. Pin-Yu Perera, works at the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Liyanage and Pin-Yu Perera are among the top all-time collaborators of Leo Poon and Malik Pieris, going all the way back to 1994.

Yan and her husband have co-authored numerous papers with Poon and Peiris too — including a May 2020 paper on SARS-CoV-2 transmission in golden hamsters and call for the development of vaccines, which received NCI and NIAID funding under Anthony Fauci.

These ties paint a very different picture from the one Yan presented to American audiences.

A photo of their wedding appeared in the Fox News article.

The Real Event 201

In 2018, Yan appeared at a symposium in Hong Kong titled “Framing the Response to Emerging Virus Infections” where she gave a presentation on combining vaccines for possible use as a universal flu shot. The speaker list – removed from the event website sometime before Feburary 2021 but archived online – included several well-known figures from the COVID era, including the very figures she would accuse of creating a bioweapon and covering up its release.

Among Yan’s fellow presenters were:

• Malik Peiris (keynote)

• Peter Daszak (keynote) - the co-founder of Ecohealth Alliance, the very figure responsible for the supposed lab leak that Yan would claim to blow the whistle on less than two years later. Daszak, along with Leo Poon, also co-authored the infamous 2020 Lancet letter asserting that COVID-19 had a natural origin, and participated in the WHO’s investigation into the Wuhan lab

• Ralph Baric - the figure believed by lab leak proponents to have developed the gain-of-function method that created SARS-CoV-2

• Tomas Cihlar - A Vice President at the pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences, who was in charge of antivirals, and in particular GS-5734 (Remdesivir), which was pitched at “Real Event 201” in 2018, though was not mentioned at the “look-at-this Event 201” held in 2019. It was the DOMANE program run by Dr. Robert Malone in January 2020 that suggested Remdesivir would be an ideal product to use for new deadly novel coronavirus.[47]

• Kizzmekia Corbett - then a senior figure under Fauci at the NIAID and NIH’s Vaccine Research Center and the figure who ran the first coronavirus vaccine trials.

Australia was also heavily represented, implying a presence of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

Despite the prominence of its participants, this event received little attention from dissident media, which focused instead on highly publicized Johns Hopkins University’s “Event 201.”

Yan’s remote appearance used the same set as Corbett’s, raising the possibility that she was already in the United States – again contradicting her later story.

The Accent Slip and the Spy Claim

Yan later accused her husband of being a Chinese government agent who threatened to murder her. But his LinkedIn profile states he cannot read simplified Chinese (the language in which Lu De publishes) making it unlikely he read the messages that supposedly sparked his outrage.

Body language analyst Mandy O'Brien noted that despite Yan’s Chinese accent, she never stumbles over English and speaks at a rapid, fluent pace. In one interview on Bannon’s War Room, she briefly drops her accent while saying “sorry” in what sounds like native American English.

The slip, while subtle, suggests she may have spent more time in the U.S. — or even grown up here — than she has ever admitted.

According to the narrative Yan presented in the Fox News article, Perera pressured her to stay quiet about the supposed coverup after he read her communications with Lu De, the billionaire Youtuber seeking regime change from the U.S.. She has since expanded that narrative, accusing her husband of being a Chinese government spy and threatening to murder her and anyone who assists her when she told him she planned to leave Hong Kong.

However, Perera’s professional Linkedin profile indicates that he cannot read simplified Chinese, meaning he would have been unable to read text communications between Yan and Lu De, unless they had communicated in English rather than their native Cantonese tongue.

A Political Actor

In August 2017, having successfully guided Trump to the White House, Steve Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker turned Hollywood mogul, left his position as chief strategist to return to the mediasphere.

"I feel jacked up," he told the Weekly Standard. "Now I'm free. I've got my hands back on my weapons."

Bannon had long predicted a major war in the Middle East and another against China, portraying them as civilizational clashes against eastern forms of barbarism.

“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian west is on the retreat,” Bannon said in a February 2016 War Room broadcast.

“We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years,” he declared one month later.

He was introduced to Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire and fugitive from Beijing.

The pairing was brokered by neoconservative journalist Bill Gertz, who was fired from the Washington Free Beacon after secretly taking $100,000 from a Hong Kong tycoon tied to Guo while writing puff pieces about him. Gertz later joined the Washington Times, a right-wing paper run by the Korean Unification Church, where he published the first U.S. article claiming that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a Chinese lab.

Guo began to lavishly finance Bannon, and they together built GTV and GNews, media platforms designed to destabilize the Chinese government.

Guo ran call-in shows and published highly produced rock music videos, complete with bizarre outfits and back up dancers, calling to overthrow Beijing.

In January 2020, as the virus narrative gained steam, Bannon renamed his podcast War Room: Pandemic. His show featured ex-intelligence agent turned MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec and Kyle Bass — both active in Cold War-style anti-China advocacy.

“You may not have an interest in the pandemic, but the pandemic has an interest in you,” Bannon quipped on a January 25 broadcast alongside intelligence agent-turned MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec and cold warrior Kyle Bass.

At the same time, Wang Dinggang, a key player in their media network, promoted Yan’s claims.

By March 1, Bannon was appearing on Fox News to demand that Xi Jinping allow U.S and CDC inspectors into the Wuhan lab, and hailed Trump for his supposed efforts to “force more transparency” from the Chinese president. On April 28, Yan allegedly arrived in the U.S. on a flight paid for by Guo.

Photo: Li Meng Yan and Steve Bannon in the background of a photo with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and billionaire anti-China Youtuber Dinggang.

The lab leak narrative was quickly adopted by neoconservatives including Frank Gaffney and Republican officials Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz. Trump himself claimed that he had seen evidence proving with a “high degree of confidence” that the virus originated in China, however, when pressed to publicize the supposed evidence, the president refused and cited a higher authority – a strange appeal for the U.S. government’s top official.

“I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that,” he said.

On June 3, 2020 — the anniversary of Tiananmen Square — Bannon and Guo launched the “New Federal State of China” from a yacht off Manhattan, livestreaming an eight-hour broadcast with the Statue of Liberty in the background. Guo shouted “Down with the CCP!” in Mandarin while Bannon looked on.

(Archived)

Weeks later, Yan appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Epoch Times, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and Bannon’s show. Her interviews racked up millions of views. Her claims were censored on Facebook and Instagram, and her Twitter account was temporarily suspended – adding a layer of subversive appeal.

Politifact, owned by the Facebook-funded Poynter Institute, called Carlson’s interview of Li-Meng Yan a “debunked conspiracy theory,” though claimed that a lab leak is plausible.

She also appeared in the viral documentary Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus, produced by Falun Gong’s Epoch Times network. Though marketed as anti-establishment, the network has long received funding via Friends of Falun Gong — a front group created by U.S. diplomat and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) co-founder Mark Palmer.

On the July 28, 2020 episode of War Room: Pandemic, Bannon introduced Yan as a “defector” who would be essential in achieving regime change in China – what he called the “defining issue of the first half of the 21st century.”

Weeks later, Bannon was arrested on Guo’s yacht on charges of defrauding donors who had contributed $25 million to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, but Trump would later pardon Bannon in one of the final acts of his first term. In March 2023, Guo would be arrested and in July 2024 convicted of defrauding more than $1 billion from investors.

On October 8 2020, Yan released what she claimed was a scientific paper titled “SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon: A Truth Revealed through Uncovering a Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud.”

While Johns Hopkins University and outlets like CNN and Vox pointed out its glaring weaknesses, none bothered to examine Yan’s personal and professional associations with the very people she blamed for creating a pandemic, nor the agenda she shares with them.

A Convenient Patent

On October 8, 2020, Yan released a paper titled “SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon,” which was widely panned by mainstream scientists as unscientific. What was less noted: one year later, Yan filed a patent for a universal flu vaccine – with Leo Poon and Malik Peiris listed as co-inventors.

The patent was approved in 2023. In a 2022 speech, Yan boasted about it — but omitted the names of her collaborators, the very men she had accused of covering up the pandemic. This suggests that her claims against Poon and Peiris were disingenuous, and that they may have been in on a calculated deception.

No One Asks

Since her arrival, Yan has become a regular on right-wing media and in medical freedom circles, adopting the name Scarlet Yan. She has appeared on Dr. Drew, British daytime TV, and Indian news channel WION. She has toured the country, appearing in hotels, town halls and churches alongside Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Richard Urso and Dr. Ryan Cole, leading figures in what is promoted as a “medical freedom movement.” Her claims have been cited in Congressional hearings as evidence of a Chinese lab leak and she reportedly visited the White House, ostensibly to brief Trump administration officials.

Yet despite her prominence, no interviewer has asked her the most obvious questions:

• Why did she conceal her American marriage?

• Why hasn’t she disclosed her professional ties to Poon and Peiris?

• Why did she appear at a symposium alongside Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric?

• Why did she patent a vaccine with the same people whom she accused of complicity in the lab leak cover up?

At the same time, none of the media outlets that have criticized her as a political tool of Steve Bannon and Guo have investigated her background, thus covering up the real scandal of Li Meng-Yan.

Politifact has since upgraded its assessment of her claims presented on Tucker Carlson’s show from “debunked conspiracy theory” to “in dispute”, and the lab leak theory Yan helped popularize is now mainstream. But the architects behind that narrative – and the strange case of Dr. Li-Meng Yan – remain obscured and untouched.

Read Mark Kulackz’ original article and watch his stream on Housatonic Live.