Li-Meng Yan or Yan Limeng () is a Chinese virologist, known for her publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. Her publications have been widely dismissed as flawed by the scientific community. In April 2020, she fled to the United States. She co-authored several preprint research papers claiming that SARS-CoV-2 was "produced in a laboratory." According to scientific reviewers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Yan's paper offered "contradictory and inaccurate information that does not support their argument," while reviewers from Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 criticised her preprints as not demonstrating "sufficient scientific evidence to support [their] claims." Education and early career Yan is a native of Qingdao, Shandong, China. She received her medical degree from Xiangya Medical College of Central South University in China. In 2014, she completed a PhD in ophthalmology from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou. After this, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) until 2020. According to one of her peer-reviewed research papers, she was affiliated with the State Key Laboratory of Virology, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Yan had served as a co-author on articles about Aquareoviruses and universal influenza vaccines. Origins of SARS-CoV-2 Preprint papers Between September 2020 and March 2021, Yan authored a series of four preprint research papers, wherein she argued that SARS-CoV-2 did not emerge naturally in a "spillover from animals," but rather was produced in a laboratory. Her preprints (which did not undergo a scientific peer review process) were posted to the Zenodo platform, an open-access repository where anyone can post their research. Yan stated that evidence of genetic engineering was censored in scientific journals, allegedly as part of a conspiracy to suppress information on the topic. However, other scientists disputed the validity of the papers, pointing to poor methods, undisclosed funding from politically-motivated sources, the use of pseudonyms for the papers' co-authors, and the papers having never been submitted to a journal for review. The papers were described by virologists as "non-scientific," "junk science," and written to spread "political propaganda." Reviewers for MIT Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (), which seeks out preprint papers and reviews them in an attempt to reduce the spread of false or misleading scientific news, analyzed Yan's study and issued the following statement: Given the far-reaching implications of