Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to continue funding (a) King’s College London’s symptom-tracking Zoe app and (b) Imperial College London’s React-1 Covid monitoring study; for what reasons funding for those studies has been stopped; and if he will make a statement.

We have now begun a new phase of living with the virus, as outlined in ‘COVID-19 Response: Living with COVID-19’ published on 21 February 2022. The Government will continue monitoring the virus through maintaining surveillance studies such as the Office for National Statistics’ COVID-19 Infection Survey and other data sources, including genomic sequencing. As a result, the Department and the UK Health Security Agency are no longer in a position to fund the ZOE COVID study and REACT-1 study.