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China investigated weaponising coronaviruses in 2015: Reports

Beijing:  Weekend Australian reported, a document drafted by Chinese scientists and health officials before the pandemic in 2015 states that SARS coronaviruses were a “new era of genetic weapons” that could be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed.

The document named The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons hinted that World War Three would be fought with biological weapons. The document unveiled that Chinese military scientists were considering the weaponisation of SARS coronaviruses five years before the Covid-19 pandemic. The report was published by Weekend Australian on news.com.au.

The executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Peter Jennings, told news.com.au that the document is as close to a “smoking gun” as we’ve got.

“I think this is significant because it clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed,” Jennings said.

“It begins to firm up the possibility that what we have here is the accidental release of a pathogen for military use,” Jennings added.

The document may explain why China has been so hesitant for outside investigations into the origins of Covid-19, he added

“If this was a case of transmission from a wet market it would be in China’s interest to co-operate … we’ve had the opposite of that.”

A cybersecurity expert who investigates leaked Chinese government documents, Robert Potter, was asked by The Australian to verify the paper. He says the document surely isn’t fake, reported news.com.au.

“We reached a high confidence conclusion that it was genuine … It’s not fake but it’s up to someone else to interpret how serious it is,” Potter said.

“It emerged in the last few years … they (China) will almost certainly try to remove it now it’s been covered.”

It isn’t unusual to see Chinese research papers considering areas that they’re behind on and need to make progress in, Potter further stated.

“It’s a really interesting article to show what their scientific researchers are thinking,” he added.

A coronavirus named SARS-Co V-2 is the cause behind the Covid-19 pandemic, which emerged in December 2019. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, many of which cause respiratory diseases in humans – ranging from a common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

As per the latest update by Johns Hopkins University, since the Covid-19 pandemic began there have been over 157 million cases of Covid-19 and 3.28 million deaths worldwide.

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