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 Chinese-language paper is called 'The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons'.

“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.”