Boris Johnson earned a stiff rebuke from Beijing yesterday after he called Chinese traditional medicine “demented” and blamed it for unleashing the pandemic.
The prime minister made his comments to a virtual gathering of world leaders for the One Planet Summit on the protection of biodiversity.
He scoffed at those who “grind up the scales of a pangolin” to make a potion reputed to enhance virility — one of the main reasons for the trafficking, mostly to China, of the mammals.
“The coronavirus pandemic was the product of an imbalance in man’s relationship with the natural world,” he said.
“Like the original plague which struck the Greeks I seem to remember in book one of the Iliad, it is a zoonotic disease. It originates
