Australian cyber security specialists have been quietly traversing the world, training financial institutions how to guard against an increasingly aggressive rogue state.
0
Recent findings in a report in an Australian daily has yet again reinforced the call that international investigators must dig deeper to rule out whether COVID-19 is a made-in-China bio-weapon.
The controversy about COVID-19 origins has resurfaced after the Weekend Australian newspaper revealed that Chinese scientists were thinking about bio-weapons, visualising a Word War-3 scenario.
The daily cited a Chinese government document which discussed the weaponisation of SARS coronavirus. Titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons , the 2015 paper was authored by Chinese scientists, Chinese public health officials and members of the People s Liberation Army (PLA).
Normal text size
Very large text size
It is easy to forget that Chinese researchers from Wuhan discovered the origins of the 2002 SARS outbreak. In a remote cave in the southwestern province of Yunnan, virologists identified a colony of horseshoe bats with virus strains that jumped to humans and went on to kill hundreds of people around the world. They made their discovery in 2017 â almost 15 years after the first SARS outbreak.
Around the same time as the researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were searching for the bats, another group of Chinese researchers were working on a far less credible theory â that SARS had been weaponised by foreign countries and introduced to China. The claim was published in a 2015 book,
Reports on the origin of Coronavirus: ‘Smoking Gun’ proof of the Chinese biological weapon May 12, 2021, 5:25 PM IST
S D Pradhan has served as chairman of India s Joint Intelligence Committee. He has also been the country s deputy national security adviser. He was chairman of the Task Force on Intelligence Mechanism (2008-2010), which was constituted to review the functioning of the intelligence agencies. He has taught at the departments of defence studies and history at the Punjabi University, Patiala. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, US, in the department of arms control and disarmament studies. The ministry of defence had utilized his services for the preparation of official accounts of the 1971 war and the counterinsurgency operations in the northeast. In the JIC/National Security Council secretariat, he was closely involved with the preparation of the reports of the Kargil Review Committee and the Group of Ministers on natio
Chinese military discussed weaponizing coronavirus in 2015, claims leaked document
By Choekyi Lhamo
DHARAMSHALA, May 11: A document obtained by the US State Department, allegedly written by Chinese scientists and health officials, before the pandemic in 2015 stated that the SARS coronaviruses were a “new era of genetic weapons” that could be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus”, reported by The Australian.
The paper titled ‘The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons’ suggested that ‘World War III’ would be fought with biological weapons, and discussed the possibility five years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Executive Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Peter Jennings, said that the document is as close to a “smoking gun”. “I think this is significant because it clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strain