Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson disclosed in his memoir ‘Unleashed’ that the United Kingdom planned to conduct an “aquatic raid” on a warehouse in the Netherlands to acquire the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine during the peak phase of the pandemic.
He was also considering how realistic it could be to do an aquatic raid on a warehouse in the town of Leiden in the Netherlands, and take what was legally more British than it was Dutch and what the UK was in a dire need of, Guardian observes, Johnson recalls.
In March 2021, he approached some of the most senior military generals over the potentiality of the plan. It entailed ‘operating RIBs through the canals of the Netherlands’, as one of the strategies under contemplation, as avowed in the excerpts of the book communicated through the Daily Mail.
“They would then proceed to the objective area, after rendezvousing at the location; breach, contain and recover the hostage cargo; and E&E using an articulated truck to duck under the channel ports.” He wrote.
Officials also cautioned him that they would “have to justify reasons for what sentence would amount to the invasion of a fellow member of NATO,” as not being able to execute the scheme without going unobserved was out of the question.
On that Johnson’s comments: “I remember what happened, surely I knew that the things stood like that, and, enviously, this was the only thing – which I would never had liked to say – which the whole fuss was crazy.”
As he describes in the book, at the Halix facility there were millions worth of Astra Zeneca vaccine in stock. But, as he claimed irrespective of the company’s best efforts, these doses were not to leave the UK.
“They even must have wished to stop us getting the five million doses, and yet there was not any real surge on their side to even use the Astra zeneca doses” Johnson penned.
In his assessment, the EU’s treatment of the UK was “with malice and with spite” owing to the “two rates of a vaccine program” problem: The United Kingdom gave out the vaccine much faster than the EU did.
