Boris Johnson revealed that he directed top defense officials to develop a plan to seize AstraZeneca vaccine doses from a Dutch facility at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson disclosed that he assembled a group of the country’s top defense officials to plan a covert operation in the Netherlands to acquire Covid vaccines during a dispute between the UK and the EU in 2021.
The factory held approximately 5 million Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine doses manufactured by subcontractors at the Dutch Halix plant. The EU refused to send them to the UK, citing the needs of its citizens.
British defense officials gathered in Downing Street to outline a potentially “feasible” plan but warned of possible diplomatic repercussions, according to an excerpt from Johnson’s memoirs published by the British tabloid Daily Mail on Saturday.
One team would take a commercial flight to Amsterdam, while a second would embark at night across the English Channel in small boats, navigating up the Dutch canals towards the plant. They would rendezvous to “secure the hostage goods” and depart via a cargo truck headed for the Channel ports. Johnson noted that the defense officials cautioned him that carrying out this operation undetected would be nearly impossible during the peak of the lockdowns.
“If we are detected, we will have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing NATO ally,” he quoted one top defense official as saying.
Johnson, who was elected in 2019 on promises to end a protracted Brexit stalemate and leave the EU, wrote that he believed the bloc’s officials had “kidnapped” the vaccines.
“I had come to the conclusion that the EU was treating us with malice and spite,” he said, arguing that the UK was vaccinating its “population much faster than they were, and the European electorate had long since noticed.”
AstraZeneca has since acknowledged in court that its Covid vaccine can potentially cause blood clots and low blood platelet counts in some patients and has withdrawn it from circulation worldwide.