Britain’s ex-PM Boris Johnson planned raid on Dutch factory to get Covid-19 vaccines
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Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered military chiefs to plan a raid on a factory in the Netherlands in March 2021 to secure five million Covid-19 vaccines.
PHOTO: REUTERS
LONDON - Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he ordered military chiefs to plan a raid on a Dutch factory in March 2021 to secure five million Covid-19 vaccines that the European Union had threatened to bar from being exported to Britain.
Mr Johnson said the deputy chief of Britain's defence staff at the time, Lieutenant-General Doug Chalmers, had told him a raid using small boats to cross the Channel and navigating Dutch canals would be possible - but warned him of diplomatic repercussions.
According to Mr Johnson, Lt-Gen Chalmers - who has since retired from the military - told him it would not be possible to carry out the mission undetected and that "if we are detected, we will have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing Nato ally".
"I secretly agreed with what they all thought but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts," Mr Johnson said, in an extract from his memoirs that was published in Saturday's Daily Mail newspaper.
Neither Britain's defence ministry nor Lt-Gen Chalmers - who currently serves as chair of the government's committee on standards in public life - had an immediate comment on Mr Johnson's account.
The Covid-19 vaccines under dispute were developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, but doses were manufactured by subcontractors in the Netherlands and Britain.
In March 2021, the vaccines were widely used in Britain, but doses made at the Dutch plant were still pending EU approval.
Both Britain and the EU had contracts with AstraZeneca for vaccines and the EU sought to hold back finished vaccines at the Dutch plant for its own future use.
Mr Johnson - who won election in December 2019 on a promise to conclude drawn-out talks to leave the EU - said he believed EU officials were acting under pressure from French President Emmanuel Macron.
"After two months of futile negotiation, I had come to the conclusion that the EU was treating us with malice and with spite... because we were vaccinating our population much faster than they were," said Mr Johnson, who was forced out of office in 2022 following scandals including breaches of Covid-19 lockdown rules. REUTERS
