Researchers disappointed as government ceases funding for Imperial’s React-1 study and KCL’s Zoe app
The UK government has stopped funding two major Covid-19 surveillance studies run by researchers at London universities, even as coronavirus cases and hospitalisations have started rising again.
The health department cancelled future funding for Imperial College London’s React-1 Covid monitoring study, which uses home testing to track the progress of England’s epidemic, and suspended funding for King’s College London’s symptom-tracking Zoe app, according to media reports.
Helen Ward, an investigator on the React study, told Research Professional News that her team was “very disappointed” that the funding was coming to an end, “given how valuable it has been for tracking the pandemic over the last two years”.
“It is worrying to reduce surveillance at a time when prevalence is very high and rising in some vulnerable groups,” she said.
“Experts in many other countries have written about the strengths of our study which uses swabs from randomly selected people to estimate infection rates. This avoids biases that are inevitable with other surveillance methods which are based on people presenting for testing either because of symptoms or risks.”
Speaking to the Guardian newspaper on 13 March, Tim Spector, who leads the Zoe project, said the team had received “only a few weeks’ notice” of the “disappointing news”.
“We strongly believe that decision is a really bad mistake,” he told the paper, adding that it costs only 1 per cent of the funding needed for the ONS study.
The health department referred questions to the UK Health Security Agency.
A spokesperson for UKHSA told Research Professional News: “We thank all participants for supporting our surveillance work during the most demanding public health crisis in living memory.”
But they added: “Due to the reduction in serious illness and deaths from Covid-19, we begin a new phase of living with the virus.
“We will continue to monitor Covid-19 through our world-leading studies and many data sources. We will also be continuing genome sequencing of cases to provide further insights.”
UKHSA has confirmed that it will maintain scaled-down critical surveillance capabilities, including the Office for National Statistics’ Covid-19 infection survey, genomic sequencing, its Sars-CoV-2 Immunity and Reinfection Evaluation (Siren) study, and University College London’s £4 million Vivaldi study, which tracks infections in care homes.
Research Professional News understands that further information about the future of UKHSA’s surveillance programme will be published in due course.
The news comes amid a rise in coronavirus cases in the UK and follows the government’s scrapping of the legal requirement to self-isolate after testing positive for coronavirus on 24 February.
Ideally, Ward said, there would be “some ongoing surveillance which combines the strengths of both ONS Covid Infection Survey and React, and we would welcome a discussion about how best to achieve that”.
She added: “We are also concerned not to waste the large investment that has already made in the React programme. Over 3 million individuals have taken part by taking swabs or doing finger prick antibody tests. In a way is has been a mass citizen science project.
“Most of those people have given consent for us to follow them up for future research, and this is a great opportunity to study the longer-term impacts of Covid infection on future health.”