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 increase manufacturing capacity to mass produce a potential coronavirus vaccine.

The new Government ‘Vaccines Taskforce’ is working with the BioIndustry Association Taskforce to review options for increasing the capacity of domestic capability to manufacture vaccines, in response to COVID-19, including how to support the acceleration and expand the capacity of the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, so that it becomes operational earlier than planned and is able to manufacture population level doses.

For COVID-19, the type of vaccine manufacturing capacity needed will be determined by the nature of the vaccine that is developed and the technology used to produce the vaccines. The scale of facility needed will depend on how potent the vaccines are, and the productivity of the processes used to produce them.

This work is proceeding at pace, with the support of industry and academic partners, to ensure that we are identifying suitable capacity across different vaccine types, while those vaccines are still under development.