Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department has taken to procure doses of covid-19 vaccine boosters to help deliver immunity to tackle new coronavirus variants which may have greater levels of resistance to available covid-19 vaccines.

The Government is assessing our existing vaccine portfolio against current variants, working closely with vaccine manufacturers and Public Health England to understand the efficacy of our current vaccine portfolio against new variants.

The Government has also established a new partnership with the vaccine manufacturer, CureVac, to rapidly develop new vaccines in response to new Covid-19 variants should this be needed. The new agreement will utilise UK expertise on genomics and virus sequencing to allow new varieties of vaccines based on messenger RNA technology to be developed quickly against new strains of Covid-19. An initial order has been made for 50 million doses.