Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether the Government intends to commission further research into the findings in the letter by Helms et al entitled, Neurologic Features in Severe SARS-CoV-2 Infection, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on 4 June 2020.

The Department invests £1 billion per year in health research through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The NIHR continues to play a critical role in prioritising, funding and delivering research into COVID-19. The NIHR is prioritising COVID-19 clinical research activity through its Urgent Public Health research prioritisation process. A list of prioritised studies is available at the following link:

https://www.nihr.ac.uk/covid-studies/

The NIHR funds COVID-19 research through its research calls. The NIHR Recovery and Learning Call will fund research to better understand and manage the health and social care consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This follows on from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-NIHR Rapid Response Call and the UKRI-NIHR Rapid Rolling Call for research that aims to make a significant contribution to the understanding, prevention and/or management of COVID-19.

The UKRI Medical Research Council has funded the UK Dementia Research Institute to conduct a study into the clinical characterisation of the neurological and cognitive effects of SARS-CoV-2 linked brain injury.