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Twitter suspended the account of a Chinese virologist who publicly claimed that COVID-19 developed in a Wuhan laboratory.
Li-Meng Yan’s account was deleted on Tuesday after he accused China of intentionally manufacturing and releasing COVID-19.
The Twitter account was inactive on Wednesday and a message on the page now reads: ‘Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules. ‘
Twitter has not commented on the suspension of Yan’s account.
The social media giant began putting warning messages in tweets in May that contained disputed coronavirus claims.
Li-Meng Yan’s account was deleted on Tuesday after he accused China of intentionally manufacturing and releasing COVID-19.
It is unclear if there was a specific tweet from Yan that violated Twitter policy.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News on Tuesday night, Yan claimed she was suspended because “they don’t want people to know this truth.”
Yan, a former researcher at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, said that COVID-19 was ‘created by man’ and ‘not by nature’.
“I have evidence to show why they can do it, what they have done, how (they did it),” he told Fox News.
‘The scientific world is also silent … it works together with the Communist Party of China, they do not want people to know their truth. That is why they suspend me, they repress me, I am the target that the Chinese Communist Party wants to disappear. ‘
After the segment aired, the Fox News program also accused Facebook of censorship after saying they had been blocked from sharing the interview segment on the social media platform.
A video of the interview segment posted on the Tucker Carlson Tonight program page now comes with a warning that reads: ‘False information. This post repeats information about COVID-19 that independent verifiers say is false. ‘
The Twitter account was inactive on Wednesday and a message on the page now reads: ‘Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules. ‘ Twitter has not commented on the suspension of Yan’s account
Yan appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight Tuesday night. After the segment aired, the Fox News show also accused Facebook of censorship after saying they had been blocked from sharing the interview segment on the social media platform.
Yan released a report this week that he claims it supports his theory that China created the virus in a laboratory.
Since then, some scientists have said that their report is “unfounded” and have said that it “cannot be given any credibility.”
Yan’s report has not been published in a scientific journal and has not been peer-reviewed, which means that it has not been reviewed or approved by other scientists.
His report was published on the Zenodo website.
The study was produced by the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, sister organizations that former Trump strategist Steve Bannon founded with Guo Wengui, a 50-year-old Chinese fugitive.
Yan, who claims she fled to the US in April, says she was working at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, a reference laboratory for the World Health Organization, before she was unplugged after trying to alert people about the existence of virus transmission in December.
The lab has denied that Yan has ever “conducted any research on human-to-human transmission” and said his claims “have no scientific basis.”
In his report published this week, Yan claims that the virus was created by fusing the genetic material of two bat coronaviruses.
She claims that her spike protein, a structure on the surface of the virus that it uses to bind with cells, was edited to make it easier for the virus to adhere to human cells.
Other research work has already determined the origin of the virus as bats, prompting leading experts to dismiss suggestions that the virus was created by humans.
The image shows the P4 laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in the central province of Hubei, in China, which has been the center of numerous theories about the spread of COVID-19 from this laboratory.
Yan writes that his research dismisses the theory that the coronavirus evolved in nature and was later transferred to humans, claiming that it “ lacks substantial support. ”
“SARS-CoV-2 displays biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a natural virus,” he wrote.
‘The evidence shows that [the virus] It must be a laboratory product created using the bat coronaviruses ZC45 and / or ZXC21 as a template and / or backbone. ‘
She claims that the virus “should” have been created using warehouses of these bat viruses, of which she claims samples are kept in Hong Kong and China.
Yan also alleges that his work shows that the virus could be built in just six months in the report summary, but does not return to the topic later in the document.
Yan’s claims are at odds with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has previously disputed that the virus was produced in a laboratory.
Dr. Kristian Andersen, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, said that the genetic material clearly pointed to a natural origin for the virus.
“There is a lot of data and a lot of evidence, as well as previous examples of this from nature,” he said.
“We have exactly zero evidence or data that this has any connection to a laboratory.”
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, an infection and immunity expert at Columbia University, New York, said the site at which the virus attaches to human cells has a “suboptimal” fit, suggesting it was not designed.
“Also, there are no genetic similarities to other virus backbones used in any of the known (virus-engineered systems),” he said.
“This suggests that this virus was not designed.”
Yan wrote in his article that theories that the virus comes from nature and the meat market in Wuhan are a ‘smokescreen’. She alleges that CDC scientists working in China told her this.
He previously accused Beijing of lying when he learned of the killer infection and of participating in an extensive cover-up.
US state officials have given impetus to the idea that COVID-19 was leaked from a laboratory or was created by China as some kind of weapon against humanity.
A wet market in Wuhan was first thought to be the breeding ground for the virus, where the sale of live wild animals would have provided the perfect opportunity for it to spread naturally between species.
The virus is believed to have first developed in bats before passing into a creature such as a pangolin that later came into contact with humans and transmitted the virus.
Once it entered humans, the coronavirus has likely mutated to survive and then escalated out of control as a result of an unprepared population.
There are also theories that the virus was genetically engineered by scientists, or that it has actually been around for years and even killed people in the past.
Two high-security laboratories in the city, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, have been the subject of many conspiracy theories.
President Donald Trump claims he has seen evidence that the virus, which he blames only on China, came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but is not authorized to disclose it.
The Institute has denied the claims since the early days of the outbreak.
In April, Trump said: “We are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation that happened.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed in May that there is “enormous evidence” that the coronavirus outbreak originated in a Chinese laboratory, but did not provide any of the alleged evidence.
Pompeo’s claims, made in an interview with ABC’s This Week, came after he said the United States was investigating the theory.
“There is enormous evidence that this is where this started,” then added: “I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that lab in Wuhan,” he said on May 3.
He said that “the best experts so far seem to think it was man-made” by scientists, rather than being a natural virus that got away during research.
