Li-Meng Yan, a former virologist at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health, told a U.K. broadcast this weekend that she is certain the Chinese coronavirus “is not from nature” but, rather, artificially engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Li-Meng fled to the United States, she explained to the ITV program Loose Women, after being tasked with following the development of a novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019 as the only one in her Hong Kong office fluent in Mandarin (Hongkongers largely speak Cantonese). She fled the country, she said, after receiving repeated warnings that the Chinese Communist Party would “disappear” her, something she described as government behavior the average Chinese citizen is used to.

Chinese officials initially asserted that the “novel coronavirus,” as it was known at the beginning of 2020, originated in Wuhan, and she suggested that the outbreak began at a “wet market” in the city, where merchants sell live animals. Various theories implicated the consumption of bat meat or pangolins, a type of anteater. As the outbreak became a pandemic, the Chinese Foreign Ministry shifted gears, formally accusing the U.S. Army of unleashing the virus in the United States, masking respiratory disease as electronic cigarette (vape) injuries and framing Beijing for the situation.

There is no evidence linking the use of e-cigarettes with the Chinese coronavirus, nor have scientists found any evidence of cases of Wuhan coronavirus outside of the central Chinese metropolis prior to the first known case, believed to have been identified on November 17, 2019.

“The origin of the new coronavirus is the wildlife sold illegally in a Wuhan seafood market,” Gao Fu, director of China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in January.

Many have speculated that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a high-level laboratory known to have been studying coronaviruses at the time the outbreak began. The U.S. government is currently investigating the potential ties between the pandemic and the laboratory, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has stated publicly that evidence exists linking the virus to the facility.

Unlike Pompeo and others who have suggested that a laboratory accident would not mean the virus did not originate in nature, Li-Meng insisted in her interview on Friday that scientists created the virus.