All of this publicity put Yan’s name into circulation in the US and primed the public for the next phase of the campaign, which was the release of a preprint scientific paper.31 The paper exploited the vulnerability of open science to further muddy the waters about the origin of COVID-19 and push an anti-CCP narrative. The paper is an example of cloaked science — a discrete piece of scientific-looking misinformation — which gave credibility to conspiracies suggesting that COVID-19 was a bioweapon and that it had been engineered by China.
On September 14, 2020, Yan, along with three other names,32 released a preprint paper on an open-access research data repository called Zenodo. The title of the paper used scientific keywords central to the bioweapon misinformation narrative: “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather
https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/cloaked-science-yan-reports