Asked by: Lord Brady of Altrincham (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what account his Department is taking of the prevalence of false positive results when assessing the efficacy of covid-19 vaccines.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
Public Health England (PHE) is considering the impact of false positives on vaccine efficacy estimates, as part of its vaccine monitoring work. Several vaccine effectiveness studies, including PHE’s, use both repeat virology swabs and antibody testing to help exclude false positives.
Asked by: Lord Brady of Altrincham (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will publish the rate of positive swab tests for covid-19 among people who have received both doses of a vaccination.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
Data on effectiveness of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine will be published in due course, once larger numbers of the population have been vaccinated with two doses and sufficient time has elapsed for an effect to be monitored.
Asked by: Lord Brady of Altrincham (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 2 September 2020 to Question 75983, on Coronavirus: Shops, if he will publish (a) the studies and (b) other research reports that his Department holds on the presence of viable covid-19 virus in the air in (i) supermarkets, (ii) other large retail settings and (iii) other non-clinical settings.
Answered by Edward Argar
The National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation jointly awarded over £5.3million for a programme of research of eight projects to understand the routes of transmission of COVID-19 in different environments and groups of people. These projects are 12-15 months in duration and are expected to report findings in the summer of 2021.
Asked by: Lord Brady of Altrincham (Conservative - Life peer)
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 implications for its policies of the Oxford University study on the efficacy of inhaled Budesonide in preventing the development of severe covid-19 symptoms; and to what extent the use of inhaled steroids could be effective in treating all variants of covid-19.
Answered by Jo Churchill
We are aware of the STOIC study on the efficacy of inhaled Budesonide. STOIC is a Phase II trial with 146 participants. Phase II trials can indicate whether a treatment has potential to benefit patients, and positive results are normally followed by larger scale Phase III trials.
The Phase III PRINCIPLE trial, which currently has over 4,200 patients enrolled to date, is also trialling inhaled budesonide as a trial arm, the results for which are imminent. This will help us to assess whether this drug provides an effective way of treating COVID-19 in community settings.