Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to monitor the effectiveness of existing covid-19 vaccines against new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Public Health England has published early estimates of vaccine effectiveness which includes the United Kingdom variant of concern VOC202012/01, which is available at the following link:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.01.21252652v1
The 2021 Budget provided an extra £1.65 billion for the COVID-19 vaccination programme. This included £28 million to increase the UK’s capacity for vaccine testing, support for clinical trials and improve the ability to rapidly acquire samples of new variants of COVID-19 and £22 million for a world-leading study to test the effectiveness of combinations of different vaccines. This will also fund the world’s first study assessing the effectiveness of a third dose of vaccine to improve the response against current and future variants of COVID-19. A further £5 million investment in clinical-scale mRNA manufacturing has been allocated to create a ‘library’ of vaccines that will work against COVID-19 variants for possible rapid response deployment.