FOI2020/00215: SARS-CoV-2 Virus Isolation
Case reference FOI2020/00215
Published 5 November 2021
Request
Request Received: 19 July 2021
I submit a request under the Freedom of Information Act for:
All records in the possession, custody or control of the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) describing the isolation of a SARS-COV-2 virus, directly from a sample taken from a diseased patient, where the patient sample was not first combined with any other source of genetic material (i.e. monkey kidney cells aka vero cells; liver cancer cells). Please note that I am using "isolation" in the every-day sense of the word: the act of separating a thing(s) from everything else. I am not requesting records where "isolation of SARS-COV-2" refers instead to:
• the culturing of something, or
• the performance of an amplification test (i.e. a PCR test), or
• the sequencing of something.
Please also note that my request is not limited to records that were authored by the MRC or that pertain to work done by the MRC. My request includes any sort of record, for example (but not limited to) any published peer-reviewed study that the MRC has downloaded or printed.
In other words, my request is in relation to information pertaining to any record of correct isolation and/or purification of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, where the virus has been isolated from genetic and other bodily material, centrifuged and purified so only the viral particles remain.
If any records match the above description of requested records and are currently available to the public elsewhere, please provide enough information about each record so that I may identify and access each record with certainty (i.e. title, author(s), date, journal, where the public may access it).
Response
Response Sent: 4 August 2020
Revised Response Sent: 16 September 2021
We estimate that the cost of determining whether UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) holds information relevant to your request would exceed the appropriate statutory limit as specified within Section 12 of the FOIA which for UKRI is set at £450. This represents the estimated cost of 18 hours of staff resource on locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
We have identified that the most likely place that this information would be held is in funding applications submitted to the MRC. To gather this information, we have determined that it would be necessary to individually review all submitted grant applications related to Covid-19, in particular any "Case for Support" attachments and "Ethical Implications" documents, which are not searchable within our systems.
MRC have identified over 2300 grant applications in respect to Covid-19 and have estimated that it would take approximately 10 minutes per application to manually review the necessary sections for relevance. This would be a total of over 380 hours of staff resources.
Consequently, UKRI is not obliged under Section 12 of the FOIA to process your request further.
In addition, there may be peer reviewed publications which describe the isolation of the virus in the public domain, the information should therefore be sought from the publicly available information.
Documents
This is UK Research and Innovation's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.