The Chinese military is said to have had discussed weaponising the SARS coronaviruses and even suggested fighting World War III with coronaviruses, five years before the COVID has started to wreak havoc across the world.
According to 'The Sun' newspaper in the UK, quoting reports first released by 'The Australian', the 'bombshell' documents obtained by the US State Department reportedly show the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) commanders making the sinister prediction.
The paper titled 'The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons' said that Chinese scientists were into manipulating the virus into a human-borne weapon to unleash massive disaster.
Peter Jennings, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), told news.com.au that the document is as close to a "smoking gun" as we've got.
According to the report, the document lists some of China's top public health figures among the authors and has been revealed in an upcoming book on the origins of COVID, titled 'What Really Happened In Wuhan'.
"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.
Robert Potter, a cybersecurity specialist who analyses leaked Chinese government documents, was asked by The Australian to verify the paper. He says the document definitely is not fake and quoted by news.Com.Au as saying, "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."
China reported the first COVID-19 case in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 and since then the deadly disease has become a pandemic, affecting more than 157,789,300 people and causing over 3,285,200 deaths worldwide.