UK Biobank Data

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Tuesday 28th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

Again, let me thank another participant at UK Biobank. One of the features I have found whenever I have met UK Biobank participants or visitors is how incredibly altruistic everybody is: they want to do it for the common good. That is a very common theme, and I am sure that that is going to be the response now. As for contact, we asked UK Biobank to contact all participants immediately. I understand that it does not have an email address for about half of the participants, so it has written, and I believe it has sent emails to all those it has email addresses for. As to what happens next, I agree that technological changes are so fast that this has to be something that keeps up with that. The first step, I think, is to put in one or two very clear airlocks, before you get to the data, that stop you being able to export the data. That is the immediate concern. Then there are ways in which it is possible to see where data has gone, and these things will be looked at as part of the review that is going on.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, I am extremely interested in what the Minister said about leaks and UK Biobank. With his undoubted knowledge of these things, can he go back to whether there is any possibility that Covid came from activity in China, as has been suggested by an author who is here? Secondly, does he think that anybody who was responsible for getting us to close down in that disastrous lockdown should be held responsible in any way?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

This is somewhat off topic. In terms of China, I think it is very clear that there are three possibilities for where Covid came from. One is that it was a natural infection that spilled over from bats, with billions of chances for that to happen. The second is that an infection was taken into a lab and there was a lab leak at some point. The third is that it was designed in some way. I think that the last of those is very unlikely indeed, and that is what most people think. We cannot really distinguish between the first two by any other way than biosecurity services.