UK ex-PM mulled raid on Dutch factory for COVID-19 jabs

[Pelican Press 0]

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*** ex-PM mulled raid on Dutch factory for COVID-19 jabs

Former *** 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 ********* Union had threatened to bar from being exported to the ******* Kingdom.

Johnson said the deputy chief of ***’s defence staff at the time, Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, had told him a raid using small boats to cross the Channel and navigate Dutch canals would be possible – but warned him of diplomatic repercussions.

According to Johnson, 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,” Johnson said in an extract from his memoirs that was published in Saturday’s Daily Mail newspaper.

Neither the ***’s defence ministry nor Chalmers – who currently serves as chair of the government’s committee on standards in public life – had an immediate comment on 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 the ***.

In March 2021, the vaccines were widely used in the *** but doses made at the Dutch factory were still pending EU approval.

Both the *** 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.

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 Johnson, who was forced out of office in 2022 following scandals including breaches of pandemic lockdown rules.

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