A Wall Street Journal report on Monday claimed that three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalised after they were rendered sick in November 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.” The report quoted US intelligence sources. The Wuhan lab is at the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic that broke out at the end of 2019, and the US was first among the major countries pushing the WHO to investigate whether the virus was the result of a lab leak.
This report comes immediately on the back of reports claiming that Chinese military scientists allegedly investigated weaponising coronaviruses five years before the COVID-19 pandemic, and may have predicted a World War III fought with biological weapons, according to media reports referring to documents obtained by the US State Department. 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.
US officials allegedly obtained the papers which were written by military scientists and senior Chinese public health officials in 2015 as part of their own investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Chinese scientists described SARS coronaviruses, of which COVID is one example, as presenting a "new era of genetic weapons". Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, several of which cause respiratory diseases in humans—ranging from a common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
The PLA papers referenced seem to fantasise that a bioweapon attack could cause the "enemy's medical system to collapse". It references work by US Air Force colonel Michael J. Ainscough, who predicted World War III may be fought with bioweapons. The paper also includes musing that SARS "which hit China in 2003" could have been a man-made bioweapon deliberately unleashed by "terrorists". They reportedly boasted the viruses could be "artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before".
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. Questions remain over the origins of the deadly virus after a much derided World Health Organisation (WHO) probe earlier this year, with the organisation ordering a further investigation which factors in the possibly of a lab leak. Most scientists have said there is no evidence that COVID-19 is manmade, but questions remain whether it may have escaped from a secretive biolab in Wuhan, from where the pandemic originated.
China is known to have been carrying out high risk "gain of function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is near the outbreak's ground zero at the Huanan Seafood Market. There is no evidence so far to suggest it was intentionally released by China. Meanwhile, in Beijing, the state-run Global Times newspaper slammed The Australian for publishing the article to smear China.