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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to ensure diversity of (a) suppliers and (b) technology within vaccine provision in the context of the notice of termination of the covid-19 vaccine supply agreement with Valneva.

The Government’s approach to seeking a vaccine for COVID-19 has, from the outset, been to secure access to a portfolio of candidate vaccines from a range of developers. This has resulted in four regulated COVID-19 vaccines within the portfolio to date providing both diversity of supply and diversity of vaccine type.

The Government has secured early access to 332 million COVID-19 vaccines doses through supply agreements with five separate vaccine developers. This includes agreements with:

• Pfizer/BioNTech for 135 million doses of its mRNA vaccine;
• University of Oxford/AstraZeneca for 100 million doses of its adenovirus vaccine;
• Moderna for 17 million doses of its mRNA vaccine;
• Novavax for 60 million doses of its protein adjuvant vaccine; and
• Janssen for 20 million doses of its adenovirus vaccine.

Of these COVID-19 vaccines, the AstraZeneca vaccine is manufactured in the UK and Novavax has a UK supply chain subject to regulatory approval. Vaccine manufacture is a global business, and the response to COVID-19 a global effort, and we are proud of AstraZeneca’s contribution to that from the UK.