WHO team visits Wuhan lab as Russian vaccine boosts hopes

World Health Organization experts on Wednesday inspected a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan that some US officials said could have been the source of the coronavirus, as global vaccine hopes rose with strong results reported for Russia’s Sputnik V jab.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown no signs of slowing down even as vaccines are rolled out, with known infections surging past 103 million, more than 2.2 million dead and the global economy devastated.

A WHO team searching for clues about the pandemic’s origins went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the most-watched stops on a politically sensitive trip to the central Chinese city where the virus was first detected.

Peter Daszak, one of the experts, said the team was “looking forward to a very productive day and to asking all the questions that we know need to be asked”.

But top WHO officials, including members of the team, have played down the chances of finding any definitive answers on this trip, including how the virus jumped from animals to humans.

“It is very unlikely that (on) such a short mission, (we) would have a very advanced understanding or definite answers” about the origins of the virus, WHO team member Hung Nguyen-Viet told AFP from Wuhan.

The trip is under intense scrutiny, following months of calls led by the United States for an independent, transparent probe into how the disease exploded into a once-in-a-century pandemic.

One of the theories circulated in the early days of the pandemic — and being pushed by people including then-president Donald Trump and some officials in his administration — was that the virus had leaked from the high-security lab in Wuhan, though there has been no evidence to back it up.

– Sputnik V boost –

As the WHO team probed the origins of the pandemic, hopes for ending it were boosted by the publication of final-stage trial results from Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine that showed it was 91.6 percent effective against symptomatic Covid-19…