What do scientists think of Boris Johnson’s claims Covid was ‘made in a lab’?

Boris Johnson has revealed that he now believes that the Covid pandemic was the result of a leak from a Chinese laboratory.

This is a break from his position as Prime Minister, when he said that more than seven million people died worldwide because the virus ‘jumped species’.

Animal-to-human transmission in a Wuhan wildlife market remains the theory backed by many scientists, including in a landmark study earlier this month when researchers tested genetic samples of animals that were sold there early in the pandemic and found traces of the Covid virus in some species.

But in bombshell remarks in his new memoir Unleashed, Mr Johnson claimed: ‘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.’

Mr Johnson is the most high profile world leader since Donald Trump to publicly reject the notion that the virus was transmitted to humans from infected animals. 

However a major international study published earlier this month backs the theory that the virus started in a wet market in Wuhan, rather than the market merely amplifying the spread as a super-spreader event.

Researchers tested genetic samples of animals that were sold in Wuhan market stalls and found traces of the Covid virus in some species from early 2020.

They argue that this is the first time scientists have pinpointed the animals that may have been responsible for transmission to humans.  

‘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,’ said author of the study Kristian Andersen from Scripps Research.

Former PM Mr Johnson had previously linked the pandemic to what he called the ‘demented’ belief in parts of Asia that ‘if you grind up the scales of a pangolin you will somehow become more potent’ – although he had gradually become more sceptical as information emerged about the experiments being conducted by Wuhan scientists.

The director of America’s FBI has said that Covid-19 most likely’ originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.

In 2023 Christopher Wray told Fox News: ‘The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident.’

A joint China-World Health Organization (WHO) investigation in 2021 called the lab leak theory ‘extremely unlikely.’

However, the WHO investigation was highly criticised and its director-general has since called for a new inquiry, saying: ‘All hypotheses remain open and require further study.’

In April 2020, at the start of the first UK-wide lockdown, The Mail on Sunday became the first mainstream media outlet to reveal fears that the virus had leaked from a laboratory in China

A member of Cobra, the Government’s secret emergency committee, told the newspaper that Ministers were studying intelligence about an accident at Wuhan’s Institute of Virology, where scientists were carrying out high-risk experiments to manipulate coronaviruses – sampled from bats in caves nearly 1,000 miles away – to make them more transmissible.

The official line remained that the virus had been passed on at an animal market in Wuhan, despite DNA analysis of Covid-19 tracing it to bats found only in distant caves.

The authors of this month’s latest study into the origins of the virus suggested that the raccoon dog, a fox-like animal common in East Asia, could have been a major carrier of the virus.

Other animals such as masked palm civets, hoary bamboo rats and Malayan porcupines were also found to be carrying Covid-19 at the wet market before the disease was widespread in humans.

This is not a definitive list as many of the key animal species were cleared out from the market before the Chinese health team arrived, said Florence Débarre of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who led the study.

Writing on Twitter, she said that ‘a lab leak is a possibility that deserves consideration and has. No one will tell you differently.’

But she said ‘current versions of the lab leak are conspiracy theories’, for instance the claim that the authors of her study ‘believe in a leak in private but have conspired to hide the truth since 2020 under Fauci’s pressure’.

This claim ‘IS an insane conspiracy theory. I hope this helps,’ she said.

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