Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of the covid-19 antibody testing kits.

The Government is currently evaluating antibody tests at pace, through a special process at Oxford University, overseen by several of the leading scientists in the field. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has also published a ‘Target Product Profile’ for serology tests, outlining expected test performance.

The results from the first evaluation of antibody tests have shown that, of the tests the Government has looked at so far, none have proven accurate enough to be rolled out for clinical use. Further information on the methodology and results of the evaluation process has been published in a paper (which has been submitted to the Lancet for acceptance and review), which can be found at the following link:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v1

As new tests become available, we will continue to review them through the process outlined above, at pace.