“I secretly agreed with what everyone thought, but I didn’t want to say it out loud: that it was all crazy,” Johnson said in an excerpt from his memoirs.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson He said he ordered military chiefs to plan a raid on a Dutch factory in March 2021 to get 5 million vaccines against el COVID-19 that the European Union had threatened to ban exports to the United Kingdom.
Johnson said that the deputy chief of the British Defense Staff at the time, Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, told him that a raid using small boats to cross the English Channel and navigate the Dutch canals would be possible, but warned him of the diplomatic repercussions.
According to Johnson, Chalmers – who has since retired from the military – told him that it would not be possible to carry out the mission without being detected and that “if we are detected we will have to explain why we are in fact invading a long-standing NATO ally.” a long time”.
“I secretly agreed with what everyone thought, but I didn’t want to say it out loud: that it was all crazy,” Johnson said in an excerpt from his memoirs published Saturday in the Daily Mail newspaper.
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The British Ministry of Defense had no immediate comment on the story. A spokesman for Chalmers – who now chairs the government’s committee on standards of public life – said he could not comment on confidential security conversations.
The COVID vaccines at issue were developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, but the doses were manufactured by subcontractors in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
As of March 2021, vaccines were widely used in the United Kingdom, but doses manufactured at the Dutch plant were still pending EU approval. Both London and the bloc had contracts with AstraZeneca for the vaccines and the EU sought to retain vaccines finished at the Dutch plant for its own future use.
AFP – Boris Johnson was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when the COVID-19 pandemic began
Johnson – who won elections in December 2019 on a promise to conclude protracted talks to leave the EU – said he believed EU officials were acting under pressure from French President Emmanuel Macron.
“After two months of futile negotiations, I had come to the conclusion that the EU was treating us with malice and resentment (…) because we were vaccinating our population much faster than them,” said Johnson, who found himself forced to leave office in 2022 after scandals that included violations of COVID lockdown rules.
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