Coronavirus: Disease Control

(asked on 19th January 2021) - View Source

Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what (a) logistical and (b) financial support the Government is providing to medical research programmes to enable the surveillance of covid-19 variants in (i) Sub-Saharan Africa and (ii) globally.


Answered by
Wendy Morton Portrait
Wendy Morton
This question was answered on 25th January 2021

The UK Government takes the global emergence of new variants of Sars-COV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, extremely seriously. While the FCDO is not funding stand-alone surveillance programmes on the new variants, our core support to existing research programmes is helping to provide critical new knowledge on the new variants. This includes additional funding of £23 million, right from the start of the pandemic, to the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) which included work on the development of a sequencing assay for surveillance. FIND are also testing whether new mutations are of concern for routine diagnostics.

Through our support to the Joint Initiative on Research for Epidemic Preparedness of up to £30 million, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, the FCDO is supporting the Africa Centre for Disease Control for diagnostics support and training for countries, which includes sequencing. The FCDO is also providing up to £20 million to the African Union COVID-19 response through the Tackling Deadly Diseases in Africa Programme, which includes support to genomic surveillance, including sequencing reagents, and machines. The FCDO also provides core support of £8.3 million to the World Health Organisation (WHO) R&D Blueprint Programme which recently convened an international meeting of scientists around the globe to discuss critical knowledge gaps related to the new variants.

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