Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to minimise the risk of covid-19 vaccines expiring before they are administered.

Public Health England (PHE) manages vaccine stocks by ‘first expiry first out’. This means that stock with the shortest expiry date is identified against orders and sent to National Health Service sites for administration into patients before longer dated stock. This is a standard process employed across all vaccine stocks managed by PHE for the national immunisation programme.