Prior to the first Yan report being released, Bannon said Wang’s YouTube episode featuring Yan was shown to and translated for him.9 As doubts about the origins of COVID-19 continued to proliferate across right-wing media networks, Guo and Bannon connected with Yan. This is when the pieces fell into place for what would become the Yan Report media manipulation campaign.
In interviews, Yan had been arguing that both China and the World Health Organization knew about the novel coronavirus earlier than they admitted. This is not a unique claim. Similar narratives, for example, were also circulating using the hashtag #chinaliedpeopledied, which went viral in March and April 2020.10 Yan put forward that she had evidence that the notion that the virus transferred from animals to humans was a “smokescreen” to hide its true origin, which she claims is a lab in Wuhan with close connections to the Chinese Communist Party.11 These claims are unfounded and have been debunked.https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/cloaked-science-yan-reports