Thought the COVID-19 drama was behind us? Think again. Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson just revealed that he considered an “aquatic raid” on a Dutch warehouse to seize vaccines during the height of the pandemic.
According to The Guardian, Johnson has admitted this in an extract of his memoir, “Unleashed,” parts of which were recently published in the Daily Mail.
As Johnson writes in his book, the intention was that the army would cross the Channel with small boats to reach the factory in Leiden where the vaccines were stored.
They would then “enter, secure the hostage goods, exfiltrate using an articulated lorry, and make their way to the Channel ports.”
James Bond? Nah, Boris Johnson
Back in 2021, the UK had paid for five million AstraZeneca vaccines to be delivered across the Channel — but the European Union wanted to withhold the vaccines for its own future use. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right?
The result? In March of 2021, Johnson took to top military officials and shared his master plan of invading the Netherlands to seize the vaccines.
Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, deputy chief of the defence staff, assured Johnson that the plan was “certainly feasible.”
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However, he also pointed out one tiny (major) problem: it was near-impossible to carry out this mission unnoticed — and invading a fellow NATO ally might be a bit hard to explain.
While he knew the idea was “nuts,” Johnson admits that he didn’t want to say it out loud at the time. After all, he felt like he was fighting for British lives.
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