Boris Johnson believes the Covid pandemic began because of a devastating Chinese lab leak, not as a result of animal-to-human transmission at a Wuhan wildlife market.
In the latest revelation of his sensational new memoir, Johnson abandons his initial claim when he was Prime Minister that more than seven million people died worldwide because the virus “jumped species”.
In explosive remarks that will increase pressure on the Chinese government to clarify the origins of the virus, Johnson writes in Unleashed: “The terrible thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made, in every aspect.
“It now seems overwhelmingly likely that the mutation was the result of some failed experiment in a Chinese laboratory.
“Some scientists were clearly putting virus fragments together like Macbeth’s witches (bat’s eye and frog’s finger) and, wow, the playful little creature jumped out of the test tube and started replicating around the world.”
Boris Johnson announces first national lockdown on March 23, 2020
The former prime minister says he tested positive for the virus in March 2020.
Johnson is the most high-profile world leader since Donald Trump to publicly reject the notion that the virus was transmitted “zoonotically” from infected animals.
The former prime minister had previously linked it to the “insane” belief in some parts of Asia that “if you grind up the scales of a pangolin you will become more powerful”, although he had gradually become more skeptical as information emerged about the experiments. that were being carried out. carried out by scientists from Wuhan.
In today’s extracts from Unleashed, which is serialized exclusively in the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, Johnson describes his moving final conversation with the Queen as she traveled to Balmoral to seal the handover to Liz Truss in 2022.
He writes that the monarch remained mentally alert despite the ravages of her illness (the details of which she had known for more than a year) and gave her two final pieces of advice.
It is one of several touching anecdotes about the Queen in Unleashed, including her curiosity about the audience’s reaction to the stunt during the London Olympics opening ceremony when she ‘parachuted’ from a helicopter.
Johnson also describes his first visit to Balmoral with his then-girlfriend Carrie, after the media suggested the monarch frowned upon the idea of staying at home as an unmarried couple.
And it gives the clearest clue yet to the Queen’s views on Brexit and reveals her fascination with France’s President Macron’s age-gap marriage.
Today’s serialization includes the additional revelation that, while still recovering from Covid in the summer of 2020, Johnson nearly died when he was swept out to sea in a kayak off the coast of Scotland while on vacation with his family.
Johnson receives his Covid vaccine at St Thomas’ Hospital in London in December 2021
And he even questions the meaning of the devastating – and ruinously expensive – confinements he imposed during the pandemic.
It follows the revelation in extracts from today’s Daily Mail that Johnson devised a plan for British Special Forces to “invade” the Netherlands and seize vaccines during the pandemic.
It also included a compelling account of how close he came to dying from Covid, a passionate defense of his behavior during the Partygate meetings and his description of the way the UK’s new Brexit freedoms allowed the UK to leapfrog the EU. to become the first country in the world to approve and apply an effective vaccine.
In April 2020, at the start of the first national lockdown, The Mail on Sunday became the first major media outlet in the world to reveal fears that the virus had leaked from a Chinese laboratory.
A member of Cobra, the Government’s secret emergency committee, told us that ministers were studying intelligence about an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were carrying out high-risk experiments to manipulate coronaviruses – taken of bat samples in caves almost 1,000 miles away. to make them more transmissible.
At the time, the silence of the British political and scientific establishment was deafening. Rather than risk accusing Beijing of being to blame for one of the most devastating pandemics in history, the official story remained that the virus had been transmitted at an animal market in Wuhan, despite DNA analysis of the They traced Covid-19 to bats found only in distant places. caves.
A Chinese scientist in the Wuhan laboratory in 2017; a leak was first suspected in 2020
Skeptics combined the thesis with the notion that China had deliberately released the virus as a byproduct of a weapons program – something this newspaper had never claimed – and called it a “conspiracy theory.”
The US FBI has since backed Trump’s views on the origin of the pandemic, saying it “most likely” originated in a laboratory controlled by the Chinese government.
In Unleashed, Johnson writes that the UK has fought this anthropogenic disease – meaning it was caused or produced by humans – “with an ever-expanding panoply of restrictions that were literally medieval in their savagery and consequences”.
He adds: “By locking down our societies, we showed that we had barely progressed since early modern England, when Shakespeare and his colleagues were repeatedly forced by law to close the Globe Theatre, and when they had rules on human contact – no more than six for a funeral, for example… that eerily prefigured some of the arcane things that occurred to us, week after week, in the Cabinet Room.