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

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.

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