Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what plans his Department has to acquire vaccines to provide protection from the most recent variants of covid-19; and if he will make a statement.
We are planning for all scenarios in the fight against COVID-19 and the Vaccine Taskforce is taking a number of steps to ensure the UK is prepared to respond to current and emerging COVID-19 variants as quickly as possible.
However, current data suggests that all deployed COVID-19 vaccines in the UK - AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna - offer protection against the prevalent virus variants currently circulating in the UK, and recent data indicates that the Pfizer vaccine remains effective against Beta variant.
We continue to assess the efficacy of the vaccines currently in our portfolio against new and future variants of the virus and continue to work closely with vaccine manufacturers to ensure that vaccines that have already received UK regulatory approval could be suitably updated, where possible and where needed, to remain effective against emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2.