I thought this sounded insane but the mirror, the times, the daily mail and others are also reporting it. We live in interesting times.
Boris Johnson considered ‘raid’ on vaccine plant in the Netherlands
Submitted 11 months ago by shish_mish@lemmy.world to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
Comments
shish_mish@lemmy.world 11 months ago
TWeaK@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Of course the Russian puppet prime minister would suggest fighting Europe.
thehatfox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It sounds crazy a “raid” was ever even considered. As if things weren’t difficult enough at the time, launching military action against our neighbour would have been catastrophic.
Relations with the EU would have been completely torn to shreds, even the UK’s global image would start approaching pariah status.
Not to mention the precedent that would have set either.
Utterly reckless, even by the standards of Boris Johnson.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 11 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Boris Johnson’s appearance before the Covid-19 inquiry is not until Wednesday but it is already making headlines in the Netherlands amid a mixture of amusement and alarm at claims he asked for British spies to plan a “raid” on a Dutch vaccine plant.
The operation – according to sources who briefed Johnson’s employer, the Daily Mail – would have taken place against the backdrop of a tit-for-tat row in March 2021 between the then prime minister and the EU, which was moving towards restricting exports of vaccines across the Channel.
An “enraged” Johnson asked security services to draw up “military options” to obtain “impounded” doses of AstraZeneca vaccine from a plant in Leiden after Britain had negotiated a deal with the company.
But while Britain’s security services were spared their biggest debacle on Dutch soil since Operation Market Garden, the claim has been widely reported on front pages in the Netherlands.
Elsewhere, Russian state media generated a po-faced report on the claims, interspersing clips of Johnson with footage of British special forces and overlaying them with a sinister backing track.
Johnson is expected to admit some fault when he is cross examined at the inquiry but will also seek to talk up the things that he believed he got right, ranging from the vaccines rollout to eventually opening up the economy.
The original article contains 518 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
tal@lemmy.today 11 months ago
Just a reminder of the situation:
biospace.com/…/european-commission-raids-astra-ze…
independent.co.uk/…/italy-vaccine-astrazeneca-pol…
I imagine that that was a pretty not-fun time for AstraZeneca.
EU: AstraZeneca’s says that their production isn’t meeting quotas. They must be smuggling some to the UK. Let’s raid their Belgian production facilities.
Also EU: No, that didn’t turn anything up. Maybe they’re hiding some in their Italian production facilities.
EU: Darn, they weren’t smuggling them there either.
UK leadership: AstraZeneca’s been raided by the EU. Let’s do a military raid on their Dutch production facilities.
AstraZeneca: We told you, we’re having production problems. Can you lunatics all just leave us alone so that we can just focus on production?
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 11 months ago
Yeah, to be fair to Johnson, he wasn’t any more insane than the EU leadership, admittedly that isn’t a very high bar…
mannycalavera@feddit.uk 11 months ago
People lost their fucking minds during the pandemic. What a shit show. Didn’t the EU try and sue AZ multiple times?