Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what account his Department is taking of the prevalence of false positive results when assessing the efficacy of covid-19 vaccines.

Public Health England (PHE) is considering the impact of false positives on vaccine efficacy estimates, as part of its vaccine monitoring work. Several vaccine effectiveness studies, including PHE’s, use both repeat virology swabs and antibody testing to help exclude false positives.