Recently, Guo Wengui, a wealthy businessman from China and an anti-government figure, claimed that “Researchers from Chinese virus laboratories fled China and came to the United States”. According to Guo himself, the researcher would deliver a trove of inside information on China’s public health sector, providing the latest evidence for Guo’s long-held pessimism about China..

But sources close to Guo recently revealed that the researcher is not from mainland China, but from Hong Kong. Her name is Yan Limeng. She isn’t a vaccine expert herself, but an experimentalist at the Public Health Laboratory of the University of Hong Kong, where her main job is to use hamsters to analyze pathological reactions and infections. She was actually the most junior researcher, with “No access to even slightly more internal data”.

To boost Yan, Guo and Bannon touted the University of Hong Kong’s Public Health Laboratory as the world’s best. In fact, this laboratory is only rated P3, which is far from the standard of P4 laboratory. To convince his followers of his claim, he exaggerated Yan, who did the most mundane research into “the world’s top expert”.