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 UK vaccine production capacity.

The Vaccines Taskforce is working with the BioIndustry Association Taskforce to review and increase where possible, existing domestic capability to manufacture vaccines in response to COVID-19. This includes a review of the acceleration and increasing capacity of the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, so that it becomes operational earlier than planned and can 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 across different vaccine types, while those vaccines are still under development.