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 assist other nations in identifying new variants of the covid-19 virus.

On 26 January, we announced a global offer of United Kingdom genomics expertise to detect new variants of COVID-19. Following this, the New Variants Assessment Platform (NVAP) has been developed by Public Health England. The primary aim of the NVAP is to support global mapping of variants of concern, feeding into the World Health Organization, with further assessments to determine the risk of vaccine escape when deemed necessary.

In addition to the NVAP there are several work programmes, including through the UK’s G7 presidency, which address other aspects of global pathogen surveillance needs.