ANALYSIS

EUROPEAN Union chiefs have drawn up plans to seize Covid jabs headed for our shores in a declaration of war against Britain’s hugely successful vaccination programme.

Dressed up as a “transparency mechanism”, the bloc reared its ugly head to demand that from today all vaccine producers must alert customs authorities before shipping jabs abroad.

Brussels bureaucrats are even insisting that firms disclose all their exports outside the bloc for the last three months in order to orchestrate their crackdown.

Officials have decided that Britain should be the only country in its immediate “neighbourhood” that the export ban applies to, except for rogue states such as Russia and Turkey.

Eurocrats have admitted the UK’s “big production capacities” played a role in the decision.

The draconian measures were introduced because of a row between the bloc and UK-based AstraZeneca over how many doses it is due to deliver to Europe.

The Anglo-Swedish firm was threatened with legal action unless it diverted tens of millions of British-made doses to the bloc to plug a shortfall of close to 50 million jabs.

Belgium, where the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is made, backs tough measures, and is even drawing up its own national protections to shut down exports.

Britain has ordered 40 million doses from the firm.

Germany, France and Poland are part of a growing band of EU states that would rather entertain vaccine nationalism than allow jabs to circulate freely around the world.