Recommendation 20

In our assessment, many of the risks that the portfolio approach was intended to mitigate remain. Most notable among these is the risk that future variants of the virus may respond better to one vaccine than another, perhaps a vaccine the UK has not procured. We asked the Taskforce what it was doing to protect the UK against such risks. It agreed that it had indeed ended up with a narrow set of suppliers. But it considered that, in spite of continuing uncertainties, it had adequate provisions to access timely variant vaccines for the UK at fixed prices, thereby protecting taxpayers against rising global prices.47