Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what criteria his Department is using to assess the effectiveness of the NHS's roll out of the covid-19 vaccine.

Through Public Health England’s (PHE) surveillance strategy, we are monitoring how effective the vaccines are at protecting against a range of outcomes including: infection; symptomatic disease; hospitalisations; mortality; and onwards transmission.

PHE is implementing this surveillance strategy in collaboration with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, NHS England and NHS Improvement, and academic partners. Initial results from this strategy were published on 1 March 2021 and show that both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines are highly effective in reducing COVID-19 infections among people aged 70 years old and over.