Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether the Government plans to implement the recommendation of the British Society of Immunology and introduce a robust programme of immune monitoring to assess how altering the dosing schedule affects the efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines with rapid modification of dosing schedules as appropriate.

Public Health England (PHE) is employing existing surveillance systems and enhanced follow-up of cases to monitor how effective the vaccine is at protecting against a range of outcomes including infection, symptomatic disease, hospitalisations, mortality and onwards transmission.  Data from PHE’s SIREN study, published on 22 February, shows good evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine helps to interrupt virus transmission and that one dose is effective against the virus from three to four weeks after the first dose. Data shows one dose reduces the risk of catching infection by more than 70%, rising to 85% after the second dose.