Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of civil servants supporting the (a) development and (b) deployment of anti-viral drugs to reduce covid-19 symptoms.

The pursuit of safe and effective COVID-19 treatments is a cross-Government effort from people in UK Research and Innovation looking at early stage research and development, to those in the National Institute for Health Research supporting clinical trials, and the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Public Health England (PHE) and NHS England overseeing medicine supply, manufacturing and procurement strategies.

The Therapeutics Taskforce is driving forward, expediting and co-ordinating efforts to research, produce and distribute safe and effective COVID-19 treatments to patients as soon as possible.

We estimate that there are at least 50 civil servants (27.4 full-time equivalents) working across the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and PHE on the development and deployment of treatments for COVID-19. It is not possible to segregate this figure for anti-viral drugs only.