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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate he has made of the number of doses of covid-19 vaccines the UK will take receipt of in (a) 2021 and (b) 2022; and of those does, what estimate he has made of the number that will be needed for domestic use in each of those years.

Vaccines are a precious resource and are in very high demand across the world; therefore, for security reasons it is not possible to provide detail about the size of our supplies or give exact detail about future deliveries.

The UK Government has secured early access to 397 million vaccine doses through supply agreements with six separate vaccine developers, of which four have received regulatory approval and three are currently in deployment. This includes agreements with:

• Pfizer/BioNTech for 100 million doses
• University of Oxford/AstraZeneca for 100 million doses
• Moderna for 17 million doses
• Novavax for 60 million doses
• Janssen for 20 million doses
• Valneva for 100 million doses

In addition, the Government has a reservation agreement with GlaxoSmithKline/Sanofi Pasteur for 60 million doses and a non-binding agreement with CureVac for 50 million doses.

We do not yet know how long vaccines will provide protection against Covid-19. For this reason, the Government is developing a plan for a vaccine booster campaign to protect against a resurgence of the virus in winter 2021/22. The final decision on what a booster programme will look like – and the cohorts included - will depend on the data from ongoing clinical trials, such as the COV-Boost trial, and advice from the independent medical experts at the JCVI. For this reason, we are currently unable to specify final dose numbers that may be required for 2021 and 2022.

However, as announced by my Rt. Hon. Friend the Prime Minister ahead of the G7 Summit, the UK has committed to donating 5 million vaccine doses, primarily through COVAX by the end of September 2021, for use in the world’s poorest countries. The Prime Minister has also committed to making a total of 100 million doses available within the next year, including a total of 30 million by the end of 2021.