Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the UK's preparedness for another pandemic.
Pandemic preparedness is kept under continuous review and evolves in response to new scientific information, lessons learned from prior pandemics, responses to other infectious disease outbreaks and exercises to test response mechanisms. We continue to prepare for a range of pandemic and emerging infectious disease scenarios and aim to have robust, flexible and deployable capabilities which can be adapted to outbreaks of different scales and characteristics.
The UK Health Security Agency became fully operational on 1 October 2021 and is dedicated to ensuring that we are protected from all future health threats, including enhancing preparedness for pandemics via the Centre for Pandemic Preparedness.