Britain considers military raid to seize Dutch Covid vaccinations – POLITICO

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering sending troops to the Netherlands to seize a stockpile of five million doses of Covid vaccine stored in Leiden, according to an excerpt from his forthcoming memoirs published in the Daily Mail.

In spring 2021, the EU and the UK fought over the production of Covid-19 vaccines at a factory in Leiden, near the Dutch coast. The factory was run by Halix and supplied AstraZeneca vaccines on behalf of both the UK and the EU.

Given the shortage of vaccine doses, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had threatened to stop vaccine exports to countries with higher vaccination rates than the EU and to countries that refused to share their own vaccine supplies with the bloc – both criteria that applied to the United Kingdom at the time.

In his memoirs, titled Unleashed, Johnson explains how, after two “futile” negotiations with the EU over the release of the doses, he demanded that British forces come up with a plan to extract them by force. Johnson said senior Army officials offered to secretly send soldiers across the English Channel to seize the vaccines.

The plan was eventually abandoned because invading a NATO ally would be “crazy,” Johnson explains in his memoirs.