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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether advanced orders placed for new covid-19 vaccines such as the Janseen vaccine will be designed around the latest variants known to be in existence at the time of delivery.

The UK Government has secured early access to 397 million vaccines doses through supply agreements with six separate vaccine developers. 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.

The Government is working closely with vaccine manufacturers and Public Health England to understand the efficacy of our current vaccine portfolio against new variants and will continue to monitor the picture with variants as it develops.

The Government announced on 3 June 2021 that it has started commercial negotiations with AstraZeneca for future supplies of the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine that have been adapted to tackle the Beta variant first identified in South Africa.