A Chinese virologist who escaped her communist homeland to the United States is claiming that the coronavirus came from a Chinese military lab. The whistleblower, Dr. Li Meng-Yan, said she fled to the United States out of fear that she would be killed for exposing the truth.
Li says she discovered the military lab as the source of the outbreak while she studied the virus’s transmission from her position as virology specialist at Hong Kong’s School of Public Health. China has denied the allegations.
The communist government has alleged for months that the coronavirus emerged from a Wuhan wet market, something Li says was “just used as a decoy.”
“At that time, I had clearly assessed that the virus came from a Chinese Communist Party military lab,” Li said.
But, she says, her report was not taken seriously by her superiors. Li also claimed that the initial Chinese response of locking entire families in their homes together for weeks aggravated the epidemic. The appropriate response, she says, would have been testing and isolating individuals.
The University of Hong Kong, where Li was employed, has contradicted her account, saying that her assertions do not “accord with the key facts as we understand them.”
