The article quoted below is based on Mark Landler’s interview with Boris Johnson that Johnson gave to promote his Unleashed book. Johnson’s “proudest achievement” is the speed with which British citizens received Covid-19 vaccines. Similarly, I believe one of Donald Trump’s proudest achievements during his first administration was the speed with which his Operation Warp Speed brought American citizens the Covid-19 vaccines.
(p. C5) In March 2021, during the depths of the pandemic, Johnson wrote that he weighed a military raid on a warehouse in the Netherlands to seize five million doses of Covid vaccine that he said were being held illegally by the Dutch government. Having run through the options, one of his military advisers warned him that this would constitute an invasion of a NATO ally.
“I knew he was right,” Johnson wrote. “I secretly agreed with what they all thought but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts.”
However harebrained, the scheme was in the service of what Johnson casts as his proudest achievement in government: Britain’s vaccine rollout, one of the fastest of any advanced economy. He credits not just the brilliance of the scientists at Oxford who formulated the AstraZeneca vaccine or the National Health Service, which rapidly distributed it, but also Brexit, which he said enabled Britain to approve the vaccine faster than its European Union neighbors.
Critics insist that Britain could have acted unilaterally, even if it were still a member of the European Medicines Agency, which approves drugs for the E.U. Johnson dismissed that as magical thinking. “Did the Pasteur Institute?” he asked. “Did the Max Planck Institute? Did anybody else?”
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version has the date Oct. 12, 2024, and has the title “Boris Johnson Makes a Case for Trump’s Return, and Perhaps, His Own.”)
Boris Johnson’s book mentioned in my initial comments is:
Johnson, Boris. Unleashed. New York: Harper, 2024.