Given your strong support of Dr. Yan, I think I should tie up a few loose ends in my previous posts to set the record straight, and maybe you would start to see why people like me who had been reading about the virus long before she came on the scene are not impressed.
1. I only know her initial version of the events since I did not follow her after that. According to her, she was asked to work on the virus in December 2019, but at some point her superior told her not to pursue it any further while alluding to some red line, and she somehow felt threatened. That was about all she told us at the time about why she had to flee immediately.
2. Her boss actually has the authority to tell her what to work on; even if she questioned the motive, I don’t see how it became a threat to her life especially since she never tried to defy his order. What she said just didn’t make sense, though it appears she had straightened and embellished her story since. (Incidentally, I read an unrelated and unconfirmed report about some questionable characters in the top management of the lab at HKU, but that is another story).
3. That she hardly knew much about the covid19 virus both before and after Dec 2019 really shows. Everything she had told us about the outbreak are secondhand info and she admits those were from her contacts, like the virus was transmissible, etc. Whether she really had contacts feeding her information or she just rehashed what was already public knowledge, we don’t need to sort out when the bottom line is, she has not told us anything new. She seems to think people knew nothing about the virus and she was the first person to tell us anything about it.
4. Multiple sources had already reported extensively on the unusual structure of the virus, that’s why I’m not interested in another such report from a Johnny-come-lately. What we all want to see is evidence of a smoking gun and likely only an insider who defects could provide. But as I said, it’s okay because spreading an epidemic is a serious crime while engineering a lethal virus is not.
5. The CCP Military was the first to test a vaccine very early on (March 2020?) and there was a propaganda video of a female General getting inoculated with the vaccine. It is logical to think the military lab had created the virus, but there is no proof and I doubt she has the connections to be privy to what’s going on in that lab. Even if she is one of the first or even the very first person in all of China to study coronaviruses, it is still a far cry from studying the specific Covid19 virus.
6. When I said exposing the truth anonymously, I was not talking about going to sites like Reddit or some such, but rather, writing confidential letters to, say, the US government (and start with the US Consulate in HK, for example) telling them what she has got and promising to reveal her identity when the time is right. Her situation is no different from what a whistleblower in any other field would have to face.
7. What does she gain? She will gain legal status to stay in the US, a chance to get far away from her old life in China (again, not saying it is true, just a possibility), and her 15 minutes of fame in the media. She obviously decided it was worth it and wasted no time putting it into action - any waiting or delay could undermine her claim of being in danger. Her mother, who could be a CCP member for all we know, is ironically not in real danger given a high profile case like this; and I wouldn’t worry too much about the condition she now finds herself in when it is not permanent.
I looked at your response and it seems to me that there are a few things we agree on and a few things we disagree on. The disagreement will have to remain just that — disagreements because it depends on how we interpret the evidence at hand and our personal psychological makeup. Some of us are more prone to skepticism and cynicism than others. Pending more evidence, we each have to be who we are.
Firstly the agreements: We AGREE that the virus did not occur naturally nor did it jump from bats to humans naturally.
We agree that it was man-made in the lab.
Dr. Yan insists that the virus was DELIBERATELY engineered and the project DELIBERATELY started, not as a means to find cures, but to release it as a bioweapon.
I don’t know if she is in a position to tell us what the motives of the scientists who engineered the virus are — to find a cure or create a weapon.
Hong Kong has in the last year, became a more rigid, controlled place since the CCP started to impose their iron grip on the city. It is useless and futile to try to reason with their executive Carrie Lam. She is but a puppet of her masters in Beijing. Such attitude, in my opinion, and in discussing this with friends who actually work with the prestigious Hong Kong University has trickled down to administrators of the university as well. It is not a stretch to imagine that she is telling the truth when she said she shared her findings with her superiors and they told her to stay silent. You use the phrase “appears to embellish” without providing information as to why this is so.
That she got her information second hand does not in any way prove that she is lying. You said that that it was “already public knowledge”.... REALLY? What was widely disseminated to the world by China and WHO ( after they could not cover up the fact of human transmissibility ) is that it was a naturally occurring animal to human transmission which occurred first in the Wuhan Wet Market. That the lab created theory is “public” knowledge is only public to those scientists who really studied the genetic makeup of the virus. Even today there are many scientist here in the USA ( and I’d include the CDC ) who tellus that it is NOT a lab created virus. I can show you articles after articles that are still in existence to this effect.
So NO. It is NOT public knowledge. Dr. Yan’s coming out as someone from within China only helped to bolster the lab created argument. This is no score against her credibility.
She has endeavored to publish TWO PAPERS ( albeit not peer reviewed but should be ) as to WHY the virus is not naturally occurring, but man made. Did she plagiarize anyone? Are there flaws in her science? These should be dealt with on a purely scientific basis. That she has endeavored to present her work based on SCIENTIFIC arguments does not tell us that she is a scam artist.
IF ( and that is a big IF ), her paper has been thoroughly vetted by honest scientists and found to have flaws, then there is a point to be made that she has a problem, but not until.
That you doubt she has the connections to be privy to what’s going on in that lab, is simply you telling us that you are a skeptic. It has no bearing on whether she had contacts in the lab or not. Either her testimony is true or not. Whether one believes her ( as I at this point, do ) or not ( you ), is dependent, as I said, one’s personal “trust” propensity.
Finally, that her motive is to gain legal status to stay in the US, a chance to get far away from her old life in China has to be weighed and compared with the kind of life she was living in HONG KONG ( despite China’s iron grip, a still relatively free city ). She is an INTELLECTUAL with a good position in one of Asia’s prestigious universities, not your ordinary run of the mill illegal immigrant from Latin America or a refugee from the Middle East. Simply gaining legal status in the USA compared to the LOSS she would incur by doing what she did, does not pass ( for me at least ), the cost/benefit test.
As I said, I like more proof that she is doing this for selfish reasons. Maybe eventually we will find out that the US Intelligence “paid” her to come out with a story like this to discredit the CCP. Maybe wealthy Chinese billionaires (many who are considered outlaws by the CCP ) “paid” her to come out with this story to discredit the CCP. That she was helped by the billionaire renegade Guo Wen Guei ( AKA Miles Guo ) is a better explanation.
This might well be true. But we need more evidence to prove the payout. We’ll each have to stand by what we currently believe and be flexible about it as events might prove either one of us right or wrong.