Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist who says she fled the country after receiving threats due to her concerns about the origins of Covid-19 and claims of a cover-up involving the Chinese Communist Party, has told Taiwan News that the novel coronavirus originated in a military laboratory overseen by the People’s Liberation Army.

Yan, who says she was among the first researchers to study Covid-19 in China, has previously told the media that the virus is not naturally occurring and described the widely held theory that it originated in a so-called wet market in Wuhan as “a smokescreen.”

Speaking to Spanish daily El Mundo in July, Yan said she had been forced to flee China after raising her concerns with officials and a World Health Organization contractor called Lee Poon. She claims that she was told to “be careful and not step on the red line; that is to say, to not go against government procedures or question their principles. If not, I would find myself in trouble and I could disappear.”

Yan also said that China and the WHO were aware of the existence of Covid-19 long before the first cases were reported in Wuhan last December. The WHO declared the novel coronavirus a global pandemic on 11 March.

Yan: Covid-19 came from Communist Party military lab

Yan told Taiwan News that when she approached her superiors: “I had already clearly evaluated that the virus came from a Communist Party military laboratory.”

Both China and the WHO have discredited Yan’s claims. The virologist says that China has launched a social media campaign in order to smear her professional reputation while the WHO said it has no record of Yan working at a high-level lab specializing in virus detection and pandemics pertaining to the organization while also denying it has any record of anyone named Lee Poon on file.