Customs seize pangolin scales

Customs officers look at seized endangered pangolin scales displayed during a press conference at the Kwai Chung Customhouse Cargo Examination Compound in Hong Kong on February 1, 2019.

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.