Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to introduce (a) immunity passports or (b) other systems of health certification for covid-19.

In order to fully understand the potential of any certification we first need to improve our understanding of how the immune system responds to infection with the COVID-19 virus.

COVID-19 is a new disease and the science around ‘immunity’ to the virus remains uncertain. We do not, for example, know how long an antibody response to the virus lasts nor whether having antibodies means one does not transmit the virus to others

In order to gain answers to these critical scientific questions, the United Kingdom Government is conducting some of the biggest seroprevalence surveys in the world – using lab-based tests to monitor the number of people that are presenting an antibody response and how this response changes over time.