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 monitor the long-term effectiveness of covid-19 vaccination.

Public Health England is monitoring the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines and has published early evidence on both the Pfizer/BioNTech and University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines. This evidence suggests that a single dose of either vaccine is approximately 60 to 70% effective at preventing symptomatic disease in older adults and around 80% effective at preventing hospitalisations. There is also evidence that a single dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is around 85% effective at preventing deaths.

As the COVID-19 vaccination programme continues in younger age groups, vaccine effectiveness estimates in these age groups will be published in due course. Vaccine effectiveness will continue to be monitored long-term in order to understand the need for booster doses.