Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson considered sending troops to the Netherlands to secure the supply of five million doses of the Covid vaccine stored in Leiden, according to excerpts from his memoir published in the Daily Mail.
In the spring of 2021, the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom were grappling with the production of COVID-19 vaccines at a factory in Leiden, near the Dutch coast. The plant was run by Halix and supplied the AstraZeneca vaccine contracted by the UK and EU.
Amid vaccine supply shortages, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has threatened to halt vaccine exports to countries with higher vaccination rates than the EU, as well as countries that refuse to share their own vaccine supplies with the EU. This was the standard applied in England at the time.
In his memoir, titled “Unleashed,” Johnson describes how, after two months of “futile” negotiations with the EU, he demanded they devise a plan to forcibly extract the doses he had demanded from the British military. According to Johnson, senior Army officials have proposed sending soldiers secretly across the English Channel to secure the vaccine.
The plan was eventually scrapped because it would be “insane” to invade a NATO ally, Johnson explains in his memoir.
