Britain is spending £29.3 million ($40.6 million, 33.8 million euros) on new coronavirus vaccine laboratories in an effort to “future-proof the country from the threat of new variants”, the government said.

The new labs at the Porton Down research facility in southwest England will be used to test the effectiveness of vaccines against variants and speed up their deployment, according to Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

“We've backed UK science from the very start of this pandemic and this multi-million pound funding for a state-of-the-art vaccine testing facility at Porton Down will enable us to further future-proof the country from the threat of new variants,” he said.

Porton Down is the secretive army base near Salisbury in south west England that identified the nerve agent used to poison a Russian ex-spy in 2018, AFP reported.