Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to monitor the long-term effectiveness of covid-19 booster vaccines.

The UK Health Security Agency, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, NHS England, Government and academic partners and the devolved administrations continue to monitor the COVID-19 vaccination programme. Several studies of vaccine effectiveness have been conducted in the United Kingdom against the COVID-19 variants and continue to be updated regularly.

Post-implementation vaccine effectiveness studies are required to understand vaccine effectiveness against different outcomes and variants, such as severe disease and onwards transmission, effectiveness in different subgroups of the population and to understand the duration of protection. Vaccine effectiveness is estimated by comparing rates of disease in vaccinated individuals to rates in unvaccinated individuals.