WUHAN

New evidence that raccoon dogs were at the Chinese market where COVID is suspected to have first infected humans has reignited debate over the origin of the pandemic.

US President Joe Biden has signed a bill requiring the declassification of intelligence materials on potential links between the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, AFP reported.

"We need to get to the bottom of the origins of Covid-19... including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology," Biden said in a statement.

An international team of virus experts said Thursday that they had found genetic data from a market in Wuhan, China, linking the coronavirus with raccoon dogs for sale there, adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade.

As it turned out, those emails date back to 2020, and eight weeks later, Fauci stood next to US President Donald Trump at a White House press conference and cited the document as proof that the theory of the virus leaking from a laboratory in Wuhan was implausible.

Travellers from China now face restrictions when entering more than a dozen countries as concern grows over its surge in Covid-19 cases, with Australia the latest to demand a negative test before arrival.

The British media outlet revealed the team had made a hybrid virus — combining Omicron and the original Wuhan strain

Ljubljana – Some 370,000 doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines so far approved against two sub-lineages of the Omicron variant of coronavirus will be delivered to Slovenia this week, with more shots to arrive by the end of the month, the National Institute for Public Health (NIJZ) told the STA on Tuesday.

Britain has become the first country in the world to approve a bivalent vaccine against COVID-19, which "works" simultaneously against the original and the current version of the Omicron coronavirus.

The first passenger plane from the Chinese province of Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic that killed more than 6 million worldwide, has landed in Istanbul after a two-and-a-half-year halt due to COVID-19.

China Southern Airlines' airliner with flight number CZ8021 arrived in Istanbul Airport at 9.30 p.m. on June 29.

President Xi Jinping has offered state backing for tech, infrastructure and jobs to revive China's economy, but analysts warn growth will continue to wilt until Beijing drops its rigid virus controls.    

Two and a half years since the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan, China is the last major economy still closed off to the world, despite its relatively low death toll.