Dr. Lawrence Sellin, a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who also specializes in medical research has raised concern over China's coronavirus research, alleging that they are creating a more powerful virus than COVID-19.
Dr. Sellin took to Nitter, a free and open source alternative to Twitter, to share a study published by several Chinese scientists.
"The #NeoCov scientific preprint from Wuhan University, which part of China's fused military-civilian biowarfare program," Dr. Sellin wrote on Nitter, linking to the study published in Biorxiv. "One of the authors, Xiangxi Wang, works directly with the military, Ke Lan works with the "Bat Woman" Zheng-Li Shi."
According to The Gateway Pundit (TGP), the scientific community has raised concerns over "NeoCov," which Chinese scientists from Wuhan University wrote about in the study. "NeoCov" is another virus in the family of coronaviruses, one of which caused the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) that took the lives of 34% of the 25,000 people it infected.
As per the Chinese study, "NeoCov" binds not only to the bat DPP4 receptor that is present in most MERS coronaviruses, but also weakly binds to ACE2, which is the receptor responsible for binding to humans. TGP's Joe Hoft alleges that Xiangxi Wang, who has links to the Chinese People's Liberation Army, "proceeded to genetically engineer NeoCoV to increase its ability to infect humans."
The report said that just like COVID, "Chinese scientists have again taken a coronavirus found in nature and artificially manipulated its structure to infect humans, but now with a virus capable of producing a 34% lethality rate compared to 1.6% for COVID-19."
"NeoCov" is believed to be not a new virus as it was found in Africa back in 2011 and therefore is not an emerging disease threat to China. But the report alleges that China is using the threat of emerging viral diseases to cover up their biowarfare program.
"Whether the virus detected in the study will pose a risk for humans will require further study," the World Health Organization (WHO) said in response to reports about "NeoCov," NDTV reported. The health authority said that up to 75% of infectious diseases in humans came from wild animals, such as bats, where COVID supposedly originated from, as per Chinese authorities.
As for the Chinese researchers, they wrote in the yet to be peer-reviewed study, "NeoCov is only one mutation away from becoming dangerous for humans."
In January 2021, Chinese scientists Yiran Wu and Suwen Zhao released a study called "Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses" in ScienceDirect. Here, they explored the coronaviruses' furin cleavage site, which are "known to increase both the transmissibility and pathogenicity of coronaviruses, including an ability to infect multiple human organ systems."
A score is attached to a coronavirus that indicates the number of basic amino acids in the sequence, the three-dimensional structure, as well as other chemical characteristics. It is believed that two basic amino acids are more effective than one, and three are more effective than two, and so on. COVID notably has more basic amino acids in its furin cleavage site and has a score that is five times higher than the SARS virus of 2002 to 2004. Meanwhile, "NeoCov" has the lowest furin score amongst similar coronaviruses.
