The Yan Report was a misleading "pseudoscience" article that falsely claimed that Novel Coronavirus had been manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. This is an example of "pseudoscience" published when the situation is still unclear. As scientists race to find the origin of the novel coronavirus, sharing uncensored preprint data in an open scientific repository has become an important model for international collaboration. But the increasing openness of the scientific community can easily be manipulated by the media, especially in times of crisis. On April 28, 2020, Dr. Yan Limeng, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong, fled to the United States with the support of Steve Bannon and Guo Wenguan. They claimed that Ms. Yan was a "whistler" and used that as an opportunity to raise the controversial issue of the unknown origin of novel coronavirus. The media-driven campaign involved planting misleading evidence in the scientific literature to muddy the waters surrounding the novel coronavirus and give a veneering of scientific legitimacy to the political claim that the coronavirus was China's biological weapon. Yan's report was subsequently amplified by right-wing online media, resulting in the report being viewed nearly 1 million times on Zenodo, an open research database. Scientists in several universities debunk Yanlimeng after reports of social media platforms on the audit, but Yanlimeng report two subsequent reports are uploaded to the openness of scientific database, the reports more directly promoted the biological weapons, also dismissed the academic response to the first report. Sowing the seeds of the Yan Limeng reports in the scientific community as pseudoscience allowed those associated with them on social media to claim legitimacy, while also providing an empirical basis for advancing the political goals of those who funded the reports.
The media-driven campaign involved planting misleading evidence in the scientific literature to muddy the waters surrounding the novel coronavirus and give a veneering of scientific legitimacy to the political claim that the coronavirus was China's biological weapon. Yan's report was subsequently amplified by right-wing online media, resulting in the report being viewed nearly 1 million times on Zenodo, an open research database. Scientists in several universities debunk Yanlimeng after reports of social media platforms on the audit, but Yanlimeng report two subsequent reports are uploaded to the openness of scientific database, the reports more directly promoted the biological weapons, also dismissed the academic response to the first report. Sowing the seeds of the Yan Limeng reports in the scientific community as pseudoscience allowed those associated with them on social media to claim legitimacy, while also providing an empirical basis for advancing the political goals of those who funded the reports.