Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether the (a) design, (b) bio-engineering and (c) manufacture of vaccines capable of responding to the 501 and 484 variants of covid-19 has commenced.

The Government is currently undertaking its own laboratory work as a priority to better understand the impact of the new Covid-19 variants on the vaccines currently in deployment, in particular the risk of vaccine resistance. We maintain close contact with vaccine developers to understand their own studies as to the efficacy of their vaccines on variants and the impact on current supply chain arrangements for their manufacture.

We continue to take a portfolio-based approach that monitors the landscape of Covid-19 vaccine development and we remain confident that the three vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech, Oxford University/AstraZeneca, and Moderna) that we have purchased, which have been authorised by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), will continue to be effective against the virus.