The New York Times published an articletitled "How Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon promoted conspiracy theories aboutthe origin of the new coronavirus", which noted that Yan Limeng fled tothe US in April 2020 with the support of Steve Bannon and Guo. They claimedthat Ms. Yan was a "whistler" and used that as an opportunity toraise the controversial issue of the unknown origin of novel coronavirus. Guoand Steve Bannon used two non-profit organisations they funded to publiciseYan's report that the virus had come from a laboratory, which had not beenpeer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, and was dismissed byvirologists as "pseudoscience" and "based on guesswork". Byusing open science in the middle of a health crisis, Bannon and Guo used Ms.Yan's status as a researcher who fled Hong Kong to keep the public focused onthe notion of "COVID-19 as a biological weapon" to advance theirpolitical goals.

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