FOI reference: FOI-2024-2005
You asked
Please provide communications i.e. emails and meeting minutes etc related to the choice of antibody test used in the surveillance testing carried out by the ONS.
Please ensure all information regarding calibration and any communication between the ONS and PHE/UKHSA since March 2020 is included.
We said
Thank you for your request.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) worked with the University of Oxford, IQVIA, Lighthouse Laboratories, UKHSA, the University of Manchester and the Wellcome Trust to deliver the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey. These organisations brought clinical, scientific and epidemiological expertise to supplement ONS's survey and statistical capability. The decision on choice of antibody test would have been made by appropriate clinical and scientific experts in the study partnership, rather than ONS.
Full details of the study protocol are available here: https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/covid-19/covid-19-infection-survey/protocol-and-information-sheets.
Whilst the ONS were not involved in the decision on which antibody test to use, we cannot be certain whether ONS colleagues were copied into correspondence discussing this topic. Email correspondence on this topic from this time period is extensive and complex, as multiple issues were handled concurrently by many staff members. Key-word searches, such as 'antibody test', have returned 1000s of emails from just 1 email account. All of these would need to be interrogated to determine whether they contain information in scope of the request. It would therefore be prohibitively difficult to make thorough searches to locate, extract, and collate the requested information.
The cost limit for Freedom of Information requests is £600, which equates to 24 working hours. This would be greatly exceeding by actioning this request. Therefore Section 12 of FOIA applies.
If you have any queries following the information provided in our response, please get back in touch.