Boris Johnson said he had top defense officials devise a plan to steal AstraZeneca doses from a Dutch plant at the height of Covid

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated that he gathered some of the country’s top defense officials to plan a clandestine operation in the Netherlands to steal Covid vaccines amid a UK-EU dispute in 2021.

The factory was holding approximately 5 million Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine doses manufactured by subcontractors at the Dutch Halix plant. The EU was refusing to send them to the UK, citing the needs of its citizens.

British defense officials convened in Downing Street to outline a potential “feasible” plan but warned of possible diplomatic fallout, according to an extract from Johnson’s memoirs published by the British tabloid Daily Mail on Saturday.

One team would take a commercial flight to Amsterdam, while a second would set out at night across the English Channel in small boats, navigating up the Dutch canals toward the plant. They would rendezvous to “secure the hostage goods” and leave via a cargo truck headed for the Channel ports. Johnson noted that the defense officials cautioned him that achieving this undetected would be nearly impossible during the height of the lockdowns.

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“If we are detected, we will have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing NATO ally,” he quoted one top defense official as saying.

Johnson, who was elected in 2019 on promises to end a lengthy Brexit stalemate and leave the EU, wrote that he believed the bloc’s officials had “kidnapped” the vaccines.

“I had come to the conclusion that the EU was treating us with malice and spite,” he said, arguing that the UK was vaccinating its “population much faster than they were, and the European electorate had long since noticed.”

AstraZeneca has since admitted in court that its Covid vaccine can potentially cause blood clots and low blood platelet counts in some patients and has withdrawn it from circulation worldwide.