Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has joined former President Donald Trump in declaring that the Covid-19 virus was a product of China's Wuhan Institute of Virology and did not come from China’s “wet” food markets of exotic animal food as Johnson has previously stated.

Johnson made the declaration in his new memoir, Unleashed. The Daily Mail is publishing excerpts from the book. Trump and several Republican senators have also argued that the pandemic was born in and released from China’s experimental virus lab. The previous UK Conservative government that recently fell to the Labour Party, also believed that the virus came from human sources.

“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,” Johnson wrote.

“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,” the former PM explained in an apparent reference to gain of function research. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has sparred with former American Covid czar Anthony Fauci about how the US was funding Wuhan lab research that created the virus.

In January 2021, he cited “demented” traditional Chinese medicine cures that utilize wild animal organs to enhance virility as the cause for Covid, specifically saying bats or pangolins were to blame.

Although China continues to deny the lab leak story, it produced a Covid vaccine three months before it acknowledged the existence of the virus.

One theory of the origin of the Covid virus holds that when wet market animals were killed, the pathogens in their fluids spread to humans. But Johnson now calls the pandemic “anthropogenic”, or manmade. Johnson also writes in his memoirs that he regrets imposing harsh lockdowns as prime minister during the Covid scare.

John has been blamed for scuttling a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine early in the war. He was quick to attack US journalist Tucker Carlson for his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin but did not deny anything that was said during the discussion.