Boris Johnson claims Covid originated in lab, in sudden U-turn in his views

Claim in ex-PM’s memoir contradicts his earlier warning that virus emerged from unsanitary ‘wet’ markets

An open-air meat stall in Taiwan (Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals)

Former prime minister Boris Johnson has said he believes the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak from a laboratory in China, and did not originate in unsanitary conditions in a Wuhan market.

He joins Donald Trump in dismissing evidence suggesting that the virus was transmitted “zoonotically” from infected animals.

The US former president insisted that coronavirus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

A security guard keeps journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

But just last week a new scientific study found it was “beyond reasonable doubt” that Covid-19 originated in a Chinese animal market.

Researchers from the US and France discovered one stall in Wuhan, China, was a hot spot for coronavirus after analysing hundreds of genetic samples collected by Chinese authorities in 2020, and found the most likely animal sources were racoon dogs, civet cats and bamboo rats.

In his memoir, Unleashed, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail, Mr Johnson writes: “The awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely manmade, in all its aspects.

“It now looks overwhelmingly likely that the mutation was the result of some botched experiment in a Chinese lab.

“Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth – eye of bat and toe of frog – and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replicating all over the world.”

In January 2021, he had blamed “demented” traditional Chinese medicine practices, such as using wildlife to boost virility, for the outbreak of Covid, saying it originated in bats or pangolins.

Various experts at the time blamed China’s “wet” markets where live animals were kept in cruel conditions and slaughtered in the street, where pathogens in their fluids could quickly spread without control.

People buy meat at a wet market in Guangzhou, China (EPA/ALEX PLAVEVSKI)

Mr Johnson’s then-fiancee Carrie Symonds backed a global movement for a worldwide ban on trade in wildlife, because of the evidence linking it to the coronavirus outbreak.

But in his memoir, Mr Johnson refers to the disease as “anthropogenic”, meaning it was caused or produced by humans.

China has strongly denied that a lab accident set off the pandemic.

Later in 2021, an expert group led by the World Health Organisation concluded after an in-depth investigation that the virus probably spread to humans from animals and that a laboratory leak was “extremely unlikely”.

A report by the Wuhan Institute for Virology found that the coronavirus’ genetic makeup was 96 per cent identical to that found in bats, which were also the original source of the Sars virus.

Mr Johnson in his memoir also attacks his own policy of lockdowns.

He writes: “In locking down our societies, we showed that we had barely progressed since early modern England, when Shakespeare and his colleagues were repeatedly compelled by law to shutter the Globe Theatre, and when they had rules on human contact – no more than six to a funeral, for instance – that eerily prefigured some of the arcane stuff we came up with, week after week, in the Cabinet Room.”