WHO team visits virus lab in Wuhan

The visit to the institute is one of the most-watched stops on the team’s mission to probe the origins of the pandemic.

Workers inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan. Picture: AFP.

World Health Organisation health experts investigating the origins of COVID-19 on Wednesday visited a laboratory in Wuhan that American officials have suggested could have been the source of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The inspection of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducts research on the world’s most dangerous diseases, will be one of the most-watched stops on the team’s probe into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The sensitive mission, which China had delayed throughout the first year of the pandemic, has a remit to explore how the virus jumped from animal to human.

But questions remain over what the experts can hope to find after so much time has passed.

The convoy of cars drove past security to enter a virology institute shrouded in mist Wednesday morning, with the first car pausing briefly to take questions from journalists.

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

An Australian scientist on the team recently said they had been promised access to the lab, which is run by a scientist nicknamed the “bat woman”.

“We’ve been told we can visit the lab,” NSW Health Pathology director Dominic Dwyer said.

The bat expert, scientist Shi Zhengli, is the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and is renowned for her extensive work hunting viruses in bat caves.

She was thrust into the public spotlight after former US president Donald Trump suggested without evidence that coronavirus was leaked from a Wuhan lab.

The P4 laboratory (L) on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Picture: AFP.

The scientific consensus says that theory is unlikely, although the WHO team is keeping an open mind and looking at all possibilities.

Months earlier, in early 2020, Ms Shi had asked herself that question — whether the new virus had leaked from her laboratory.

But after several sleepless nights, her team confirmed the genome sequencing of the new virus didn’t match the samples they had studied.

“That really took a load off my mind … I had not slept a wink for days,” she told the magazine Scientific American in June last year.

On Sunday, the team visited the market where one of the first reported clusters of infections emerged over a year ago.

Members of the group arrived at Huanan seafood market — which has been sealed since January last year — driving into its barricaded premises as guards quickly blocked others from entering, according to AFP journalists at the scene.

The mission, delayed by China and weighed down by political baggage, has a remit to explore how the virus jumped from animal to human.

But with the fieldwork element of the trip in its early stages, World Health Organisation officials have already played down expectations of finding the source of a virus which has killed over two million people and devastated the global economy.

Team member Peter Daszak described the tours on Twitter as “very important site visits”, adding that the team had “met with key staff at both markets and asked questions to help better understand the factors involved in the emergence of COVID”.

The visits were “critical for our joint teams to understand the epidemiology of COVID as it started to spread at the end of 2019”, he said in another tweet.