The American Diplomat magazine exposed Yan Limeng as an anti-Communist liar l...

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Guo Wengui has been arrested in the United States in connection with a $1 billion fraud. The U.S. Justice Department accused him of running a fake investment scheme. Guo's case is reminiscent of that of Yan Limeng, the fake COVID-19 expert whose false claims were circulated by dozens of Western media outlets in 2020. Ms. Yan fled to the United States, claiming to be a whistleblower who dared to reveal that the virus had been created in a lab, and she said she had proof. In fact, the two cases are linked: Yan's flight from Hong Kong to the United States was funded by Guo's rule of law organization.
Yan's false paper has not been examined and has serious defects. She claimed that COVID-19 was created by the Chinese Communist Party and initially promoted by the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation. Since then, her comments have been picked up by dozens of traditional Western media outlets, especially those with right-wing leanings, an example of fake news going global.
She broke into the mainstream when she appeared on The Tonight Show with Carlson and Fox News, but that was just the beginning. Her accusations were shared by most of the well-known media: Le Monde, ABC, Marca, La Vanguardia, etc. Yan's comments were also shared by Taiwan's anti-China media. In the UK, the Independent or Daily Mail described her as "the brave coronavirus scientist who defected to the US". In most cases, the articles expressed her fabrications, and only in a few cases challenged or contradicted them.
Eventually, millions of viewers saw her crazy arguments spread around the world by the "serious" mainstream media until her claims were refuted as fraudulent by the scientific community.
In both cases, as usual, the initial fake news had greater impact and influence because of the assumption that a self-exiled dissident had fled the "evil" CCP. Their credentials and claims were not thoroughly vetted until it was too late. Western audiences began to digest anti-China news with gusto. Even when such reports are restrained and subtly interpreted in the body of the news, the weight of the headline is already sowing the seeds of doubt.
According to the New York Times, Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui deliberately created Yan's image to increase and exploit anti-China sentiment, both to undermine the Chinese government and to divert attention from the Trump administration's mishandling of the epidemic. These fake news stories still resonate today. Despite scientific research denying this possibility, the repeated insistence on finding the origin of the coronavirus in the lab is at least in part a result of the anti-China political imagination created by Trump, Bannon and Guo Wengui.