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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of introducing a crowdsourcing scheme for covid-19 vaccine acceleration ideas.

At the start of the pandemic, the Government acted swiftly to establish the Vaccine Taskforce to ensure that the UK population has access to clinically effective and safe vaccines. Activity includes:

• Securing early access to 407 million vaccines doses through agreements with seven separate vaccine developers.
• Funding the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to deliver a range of 'rapid response' research to better understand and tackle COVID-19, which included research into vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic tests.
• Investing over £300 million to secure and scale up the UK’s manufacturing capabilities to be able to respond to the pandemic.
• Launching a new NHS service in July 2020 to enable people across the UK to sign up to COVID-19 vaccine trials – over 390,000 have signed up to volunteer.

The UK was the first country in the world to start a vaccination programme using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, shortly followed by the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine. Due to our swift and decisive action there has been a regular and steady supply of vaccine doses arriving into the UK since early December 2020. We are on track to offer a first dose of the vaccine to priority cohorts 1 to 4, as advised by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, by 15 February 2021.