Boris Johnson says Covid did begin with Chinese lab leak despite 'demented' pangolin comments as PM

Disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he now believes the global Covid-19 pandemic did begin with a leak from a Chinese laboratory.

The humiliated former Tory leader, who is now trying to flog his cash-in memoirs, reveals in his new book that he is no longer convinced by what was the leading theory of what caused the pandemic - that it was transmitted from animal to human in a Wuhan wildlife meat market.

Johnson, who was ousted by his own party after a series of scandals, failings and lies, is having his memoir, ‘Unleashed’, serialised in the Daily Mail, and a series of headline-grabbing claims are emerging as he tries to line his coffers,

And this latest revelation sees him disagree with what he asserted was true when he was PM - that the virus that killed more than seven million people across the globe had ‘jumped species’.

The remarks from the clownish failed PM are unlikely to pile any significant pressure on the secretive Chinese government to discuss the origins of the virus any more than they have so far.

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Johnson writes: “The awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made, 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.”

Bafoonish and lying Johnson is, unsurprisingly, echoing the similarly idiotic and dishonest world leader, Donald Trump, in rejecting the idea that the Coronavirus was transmitted 'zoonotically' from infected animals and to endorse the lab theory, which has at times been dismissed as a conspiracy theory but does have some credibility among reasonable thinkers.

In previous comments, the then-PM had once said the Covid-19 outbreak was linked to what he called the “demented” belief held in some parts of Asia that “if you grind up the scales of a pangolin you will somehow become more potent”.

He now claims he has grown gradually more sceptical as information supposedly emerged about experiments that were being undertaken by scientists in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and refers to the virus as caused or produced by humans.

As well as this, Johnson brazenly rows back on the lockdowns he himself imposed on the British people and then famously broke his own laws around by partying in Downing Street; the ‘ Partygate ’ scandal, that contributed to the end of his political career, after a series of exclusive exposes by the Daily Mirror,

The lockdowns Johnson enforced, which are credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the UK but criticised for severely damaging the economy, are now described as “medieval in their savagery and their consequences” by the man himself.

He writes that the UK fought the virus “with an ever-growing panoply of restrictions that were literally medieval in their savagery and their consequences.”

He adds: “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.”

On September 19, the Mirror reported how a major international study has claimed Coronavirus began life in a "wet market" where there were infected animals, with scientists rejecting the populist theory that Covid was leaked from a laboratory. Genetic samples of animals that were sold at the market stalls in 2019 found traces of the Covid virus in some species. Author of the study, Kristian Andersen from Scripps Research, said in the document: "This adds another layer to the accumulating evidence that all points to the same scenario: that infected animals were introduced into the market in mid to late November 2019, which sparked the pandemic."

It was reported at the time that Ministers were studying intelligence about an accident at Wuhan's Institute of Virology that was suspected by some to have leaked the virus. Chinese boffins were said to have been conducting potentially risky experiments to manipulate the transmissibility of coronaviruses taken from bats in caves.

But despite the media reports, the official line remained that Covid began at the Wuhan animal market and China was never officially blamed for the outbreak.

On May 1, 2023, the Mirror reported how the head of the FBI claimed a lab leak of Covid is the "most likely" origin of the pandemic virus . Christopher Wray, during an interview, said for the first time Covid may have originated in a "Chinese government-controlled lab".

He said: "The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan. Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab."

However, the White House revealed there is no US consensus on the potential origins of the virus.