LONDON — In a shocking revelation, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has admitted that he considered launching a military operation to seize millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses from the Netherlands during the peak of the pandemic. This surprising detail, shared in his upcoming memoir Unleashed, highlights the extreme steps Johnson was willing to take as the UK faced a vaccine shortage in 2021.
Johnson explained that he instructed the British Armed Forces to explore the possibility of an aquatic raid on a warehouse in Leiden, Netherlands, which held five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Johnson believed these doses rightfully belonged to the UK, since the vaccine had been developed with British funding and expertise. However, due to AstraZeneca’s commitments to the European Union, the shipment of these doses to the UK was delayed, creating growing frustration.
Military planners came up with a bold plan: one team would fly to Amsterdam, while another would cross the English Channel in inflatable boats at night, using Dutch canals to reach the warehouse. The idea was to bring the vaccines back to the UK by truck, avoiding EU export restrictions.
Lt. Gen. Doug Chalmers, the deputy chief of defense staff, warned Johnson that while the plan was “feasible,” it was extremely risky. “It will not be possible to do this undetected,” Chalmers reportedly said, cautioning that such an action could be seen as an invasion of a NATO ally and further complicated by lockdowns in the Netherlands and Belgium.
In the end, Johnson realized the plan was too extreme. “Of course, I knew he was right,” he wrote, “but my desperation to secure vaccines for the UK, where people were dying of Covid, made me consider extreme measures.”
At the time, the European Union had imposed export controls on vaccines produced within its borders, intensifying the struggle for AstraZeneca doses. The AstraZeneca vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford, was being produced in the Netherlands, but EU laws prevented its delivery to the UK. This frustration drove Johnson to consider the drastic action of invading a fellow NATO country to secure the vaccines.
