Image: Harvard University
Sky News host Sharri Markson has assessed “chilling” details from a document produced by Chinese military scientists, in which they discussed weaponising SARS coronaviruses five years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Ms Markson said the book was written by People’s Liberation Army scientists and senior Chinese public health officials in 2015.
The documents describe SARS coronaviruses as heralding a “new era of genetic weapons” and said they can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human – disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before“.
“The document also talks about the psychological terror that bioweapons can cause, it’s chilling,” Ms Markson said.
“To be clear … while intelligence agencies suspect, and they’ve been investigating this since early last year, that COVID-19 may be the result of an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab, there is no suggestion it was an intentional release.”
“The significance of this paper is that it offers a rare insight into how senior scientists at one of the PLA’s most prominent military universities, where high levels of defence research were conducted, were thinking about biological research.”