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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what plans there are to manipulate the covid-19 vaccine to sensitise it to the omicron and other variants; and when he estimates such vaccines might become available.

Recent analysis supports our understanding that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which are currently being deployed in the UK, appear to work well against the current dominant variants of COVID-19 after a booster-dose. Continuing to administer these vaccines at scale remains essential in our path out of the pandemic.

The Government continues to assess our existing vaccine portfolio against current variants, working closely with vaccine manufacturers and the UK Health Security Agency to understand the efficacy of our current vaccine portfolio against new variants.