evidence: Tasuku Honjo (本庶 佑, Honjo Tasuku, born January 27, 1942)[2] is a Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist. He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is best known for his identification of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1).[3] He is also known for his molecular identification of cytokines: IL-4 and IL-5,[4] as well as the discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.[5] [...] COVID-19 pandemic [edit]During the COVID-19 pandemic, a disputed claim that Honjo believed that the novel coronavirus had been "manufactured" by a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan was widely disseminated on the internet in many languages.[11] The BBC Reality Check team reported that, "In a statement published on the website of Kyoto University, he said he was 'greatly saddened' that his name had been used to spread 'false accusations and misinformation'.[11]