Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether Ministers have reviewed the decision for Professor Andrew Pollard to recuse himself from all meetings of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation discussing COVID-19.

Ministers have not reviewed this decision. Conflicts of interest are set out in the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s (JCVI) code of practice. In order to prevent any perceived conflict of interest it was agreed that the JCVI’s Chair, Professor Andrew Pollard, who is involved in the development of a COVID-19 vaccine at the University of Oxford, would recuse himself from all JCVI meetings related to the virus.