A former British prime minister, Boris Johnson, has echoed a former U.S. president, Donald Trump, in stating his belief that the Covid-19 pandemic resulted from a laboratory leak in China, rather than originating in unsanitary conditions at a Wuhan market.

In his memoir, “Unleashed,” which is being serialized by the Daily Mail, Mr. Johnson asserts, “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,” he writes.

While a recent study involving U.S. and French researchers concluded it was “beyond reasonable doubt” that the virus started in an animal market at Wuhan, other studies have found just the opposite.

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy assessed that the Covid pandemic most likely originated in a laboratory leak in China. Two sources told CNN that a DOE intelligence report stated that the department had “low confidence” the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

Mr. Johnson also said lockdowns that spread acrss the world were barbaric: “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.”