Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what proportion of the £6 billion of additional funding for vaccine development and procurement announced in Budget 2021 will be spent on (a) research and development, (b) manufacturing and (c) procurement; and if he will make a statement.
The UK was the first country in the world to procure, authorise, and start a vaccination programme using the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines. The Government has secured access to 457 million doses, across eight different vaccine developers. As of 11 March, over 22.8 million individuals have been vaccinated with a first dose in the UK.
At the Spending Review 2020, the Government announced it had made available more than £6 billion in total to develop, manufacture, and procure COVID-19 vaccines. Of that, we confirmed £733 million in 2021-22 to purchase successful vaccines and £128 million for research and development (R&D) and vaccines manufacturing. Further funding will be allocated from the COVID-19 reserve as needed.
For R&D, we have invested:
At Budget 2021, the Government announced funding of:
For manufacturing, the Government has invested over £300 million to secure and scale-up the UK’s manufacturing capabilities to be able to respond to the pandemic. This includes:
a) Facilities that have come online:
b) Facilities that will come online later this year, to help provide longer-term UK capacity:
In addition to the above, we have also funded the expansion of the Valneva factory in Livingston, Scotland.