Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment his Department has made of the efficacy of vaccination in preventing (a) transmission, (b) hospitalisation and (c) death arising from the B.1.617.2 variant of covid-19.

Public Health England (PHE) has published early estimates of vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease with the B.1.617.2 variant which are available at the following link:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.22.21257658v1

The number of hospitalised cases and deaths from the B.1.617.2 variant of COVID-19 are currently too small to estimate vaccine effectiveness against these outcomes. PHE will continue to monitor the impact of the COVID-19 vaccines on variant B.1.617.2.