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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has made of the effect of global facilitation of knowledge and technology transfers from pharmaceutical companies that have developed vaccines on the ability of vaccine manufacturers around the world to (a) begin production and (b) increase production of covid-19 vaccines; and if he will make a statement.

The UK has been and will continue to be a global leader exploring every opportunity to achieve the goal of getting vaccines to everyone across the world as quickly as possible. The UK provided funding for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which is being produced at cost to low- and middle- income countries. AstraZeneca has also announced a licencing agreement for the Serum Institute India (SII) to produce 1 billion doses of the vaccine candidate for low- and middle-income countries. The UK is also working to encourage partnerships between the manufacturing sector and other multinational pharmaceutical companies to transfer their technology where required, this enables an increase in overall production, to date 280 such partnerships.