Chinese virologist ‘fled territory to tell truth’

Li-Meng Yan claims she fled Hong Kong to expose the truth about a Beijing cover-up over the initial outbreak of COVID-19.

Dr Li-Meng Yan in Hong Kong.

A Chinese virologist has claimed she fled Hong Kong to expose the truth about a Beijing cover-up over the initial outbreak of COVID-19.

Li-Meng Yan, a scientist at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, feared she would be killed for speaking out in China and chose to escape to the United States, where she is hiding at an undisclosed location.

According to the researcher, the Chinese Communist Party and senior university staff suppressed evidence that coronavirus could be transmitted between humans as early as last December. Dr Yan, who grew up in mainland China, said she was among the first scientists asked to investigate a small number of cases in Wuhan.

She claimed the Chinese government refused to let overseas experts, including those from Hong Kong, conduct research in China.

On December 31 she turned to her contacts on the mainland for more information, including an expert at the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. One said that there were cases of “family clusters”, indicating human-to-human transmission, she claimed.

Dr Yan said when she reported to her boss, Leo Poon, an Oxford-educated supervisor at the university, he ignored the information.

The Hong Kong centre is used by the World Health Organisation as a reference laboratory and specialises in viruses. On January 9, it released a statement supporting Chinese claims that the virus “does not transmit readily among people”.

A few weeks later Wuhan was quarantined. One study by Chinese and British experts found that had the lockdown begun at the start of the year, the number of cases could have been cut by 95 per cent, according to the Daily Mail. In a statement, the Hong Kong centre said Dr Yan’s reported comments had “no scientific basis but resembles hearsay”.

THE TIMES