Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many (a) women, (b) people from ethnic minority groups and (c) children took part in the development of the covid-19 vaccines.

The information is not available in the format requested. The National Institute for Health Research does not routinely collect data on the sex, age and ethnicity of participants in clinical research studies. However, data on ethnicity was collected at a national level for a subset of COVID-19 vaccine studies between July 2020 and May 2021. During this time, 2,416 people from ethnic minority groups took part in studies for the development of COVID-19 vaccines. There were also three paediatric and adolescent studies into COVID-19 vaccines which recruited 425 participants.

Work is underway to gather more data on the characteristics of research participants, including their ethnicity, as part of the National Institute for Health Research’s strategy ‘Best Research for Best Health: The Next Chapter’.