Delta Variant May Warrant a New Covid Vaccine

Bloomberg News U.S. Health Care Senior Editor Drew Armstrong discusses how the Covid-19 virus is mutating and what precautions may need to be taken to combat new variants.

Host: Carol Massar. Producer: Paul Brennan.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg
Quick Takes Tim Stenovic on Bloomberg Radio. So we talked
earlier with our Cynthia Coons about how we need to
be ready to deal with more COVID variants coming Jane
sequencing is what we got into. Our Bloomberg Intelligence Farmer
team has come out with some new research noting that
the delta variant may warrant a new COVID vaccine to

(00:21):
combat the higher infectivity and potentially worst disease outcomes of
the variant. So let's get to it. Because when I
read in this morning, and when I look at the
Bloomberg right now, the most read stories in the past
eight hours, seven out of twenty have to do with
the delta variant and COVID. Six of them are related
to this Bloomberg intelligence research. Let's get to it. With

(00:43):
Bloomberg News is h Drew Armstrong. He's a senior head
editor for US Healthcare and he joins us in our
Interactive Broker studio. I can't read my own writing. That's
really bad. It's been that kind of a day. This
research is pretty phenomenal. Reading in um Drew I'm not
surprised because we're all kind of nervous and trying to
understand the delta variant. Tell us a little bit about

(01:03):
what we need to understand about it right now, Yeah,
I think you know a couple of kind of just
fundamental points. We know that these viruses evolve over time,
and some of these ways that they involve can be
you know, not particularly consequential virus. Yeah, everything. These virus
viruses are mutating every single time they replicate in your body.
They are a highly highly highly you know, they muted

(01:24):
very fast up until the time. Very few of these
mutations actually matter. A lot of them make the virus
so it doesn't even function properly, and you know it
just you know, this is random chance. You're basically spinning
the Roulette wheel every time from a genetic standpoint. But
some of them do matter, and we have these things
that are called variants of concern. The delta variant is
kind of the the you know, one of the latest
and greatest of these. And if you're a you know,

(01:44):
viiologist or epidemiologists, one of the things you're talking about
is this concept of vaccine escape. Does something about the
virus change in a way that it makes it so
that the immune response that's kind of sitting there in
your body ready and waiting is no longer you know, effective,
or is no longer as effective. And keep in mind,
all this stuff is kind of on a spectrum, you know,

(02:06):
against you know, a certain type of mutation of the virus,
and then does that allow the virus to you know,
that version that mutation and strain of the virus to
kind of spread and be more fit and capable in
a in a in a in a population. And so
that's really what you're worried about now, you know. The
good news when we talk about that is it. You know,
just as viruses can evolve, so can vaccines. I mean,
we come up with new flu vaccines every single year.

(02:27):
You know, there's already been talking about will we need
some kind of you know, variant booster for uh for
for this particular coronavirus, And so I think that's a
discussion that's underway right now. And looking you know, how
good is the protection and do we need to tweak
things in some way or another to attack this particular
variant or what is the virus gonna look like in
the future. Can a variant in a virus. You talk

(02:49):
about a spectrum. So can someone who's gotten a vaccine, though,
I mean, it can affect all of us differently, right,
even as a mutation or is it can say this
is the mutation, this is how it's going to affect you.
That's that's exactly right. I mean, I think the way
to think about it is that this is not a
binary question where a vaccine either you know, works or

(03:10):
it doesn't work. Um, It's more of a question of, well, okay,
this vaccine, let's say, was protective you know, against symptomatic
illness or you know, anything anything worse than mild illness
in the original strain. Well, the strain evolves, and now
that vaccine is protects still, which is still good, but
you know, it may be less protective or it maybe

(03:32):
that for example, hey, you have a larger number of
people who you know, they get they get infected, but
their infections are very mild. I just had a friend
in Los Angeles, he had both do as a fiser.
Back in April, he got COVID. He doesn't know what
varying it was, but you know, I mean it wasn't
He was sick and it wasn't fun, but he was
over written a week or something that wasn't in the hospital. No,
it wasn't not in the hospital. And so I think,

(03:52):
you know, and and who knows if this is the
variant or some original strain, But I think, you know,
we really do have to think about this as a
spectrum of protection where it's never going to disappear entirely,
it's never gonna be perfect. And where are you on
that on that range, you know, both against protecting against
infection entirely, protecting against more severe diseases, and so on
and so forth. How quickly are they tracking all the

(04:13):
data about the variant to understand whether or not the
vaccines are going to kind of stand up against it
as it continues to mutate, like well, they know instantaneously
because they're tracking populations or will there be a lag
or no, This stuff takes a while. And that's one
of the real challenges here is that viruses mutate faster
than vaccines evolve. And so one of the reasons that

(04:34):
I think the flu vaccine tends to be relatively you know,
I mean, it's it works, but you know, it's obviously
people still get the flu. It tends to be about
sixty protective is something you're looking for generally with the flu.
That's kind of what you can expect there. Part of
the reason is that you know, when you're making vaccine,
and you're making vaccine and a mass scale, as we
saw with the covid vaccines, you're doing this months and

(04:56):
months in advance. And so with flu vaccines, for example,
you're trying to predict, hey, what strains of the flu
are going to be circulating most predominantly by the time
you know, we have to They have to guess a
year or so out and say, okay, we think it's
going to be these four strains. And sometimes they guess
really well, and the flu vaccine is great. Sometimes they
don't guess so well. Man, it's only moderately protective. The
same dynamic may eventually come to play with this, but

(05:19):
we don't want that miss on covid right right exactly,
And so you know, I mean, listen, the flu and
covid are very different viruses. It's it's worth keeping in mind.
You know, this is you know, a virus that it
may be that we you know that one. You know
that a vaccine these m R and a vaccines, they
might be very effective. It might be that, you know,
if you end up doing a booster shot or something
like that, you end up with very long lasting protection,

(05:41):
you know, against almost all strains of US. I think
this is a question that is one it's it's being
looked at, but it's still an open one exactly on
whether we truly will need a new type of vaccine
or a slightly modified vaccine, if we'll need a booster,
or if we'll just be you know, say, hey, we've
got against all the strains out there with the MR
and A vaccines. That's pretty good. We don't know if

(06:03):
we can get any better by giving more shots or
modifying the shots. So we don't know yet about a
booster Like I keep thinking, do I have to circle
some date on a calendar? No, I think we really
don't know. I know, you know, Fiser has been talking
it up, the US government has been talking it down.
I think the reality is that, you know, the question
is still out there from a data standpoint in terms
of you know, how much does immunity wayne. The immunity

(06:24):
has a lot of different parts to it, you know,
is it just these antibodies which are kind of the
like live active defenses that are circulating versus kind of
the immune memory cells that are a little bit more
deminant but a little bit more permanent. You know, I
think we really do not know yet exactly what long
term immunity for these vaccines looks like, because you know,

(06:45):
they've not been out there for that long. They've only
been in people's bodies for around a year. I mean,
you know, so, yeah, exactly, So we don't know, and
I think that's very, very important. There's gonna be a
lot of data that is going to come out over
the next couple of months. Someone's to go in one direction,
someone's going to go in another. What I would encourage
people to do is, you know, try to take the
totality this information as it comes out, because you're going

(07:07):
to see headlines at the point one direction and then
owns the point the other. It's not that it is
changing back for it. This is the argument of science
happening live in real time. You have been covering all
of this stuff in real time, and I know how
exhausted you must be over the past year and a half. Well,
we start to see, though l A wear a mask.
We have conversations here in the office, like throwing a
mask it doesn't hurt. How are we as the general
public supposed to read that when you also say these

(07:29):
vaccines are really effective and they do protect us. I
think the mask debate in this country is really interesting
to watch. I don't think anybody really wants to go back,
you know. I mean, if you're listening, you know someone
who's vaccinated, Like, I hate wearing a mask. It sucks.
Do you wear it? I do on planes, on the
subway and things like that. I wear where I have
to wear it. Um and I wear in a couple

(07:50):
of situations, you know, when I'm around people I don't know,
or something like that. You know, yes, but not very often,
and like and I don't want to you know, I
don't want to have to go back to that. It
is you, it is not. It's not something I want
to keep having to do. And so I think and
and and trust me, I'm very much on the like
pro public health measure side. As I follow this stuff
and I wore my mask diligently, I think it's going

(08:10):
to be very hard from a political standpoint and a
public health messaging standpoint to reenact mass mandates again because
you know, like it's hard to go back to that
world for people, especially if they've been vaccinated um, you know,
and people are gonna have a reset risk calibration. I
would expect a little bit and and figure out what

(08:31):
their level of comfort is. I feel like we keep
hearing um drew increasingly from global leaders that in order
to get through this, we have to have a global
solution and there's going to be sharing of information, sharing
of data. It isn't really happening, is it. No? I mean,
you know, I think one of the really challenging parts
of the vaccine roll out within the context of the
pandemic is that you've seen programs like COVACS that's the

(08:54):
w h O and GAV organized program to kind of
buy vaccines and distribute them, you know, equit will be
across the globe, but really lead you know, trying to
figure out a way of getting vaccines to lower incombinations.
It has just abysmally, you know, it started, has been
a busmoine has has not worked, has gotten very few vaccines,
has done you know, has not been able to get
them to lower income countries, particularly in Africa where you know,

(09:18):
listen to people are complaining about a fifty percent vaccination
rate in the United States. It's one percent in in Africa,
and they're having death spike in those places. We need
to be concerned about these hotspots. Like I think there
are people listening, like that's far away from me, but
I also remember back in December January, where like China,
that's far away from me, it's never going to touch us,
And here we are. Yeah, I mean, you know, listen,

(09:39):
unvaccinated populations are pretty effective breeding grounds for new variants.
And we've seen what happens when very you know, variant
evolves that is successful and kind of leaping around a
vaccine or is a very effective hitting you know, unvaccinated
or vulnerable populations. And so yeah, I mean, just from
like a purely selfish standpoint, it's a good thing. Like
we all get on airplane to travel around the world

(10:00):
and you know, go to these places or people come
from these places, and you know, virus doesn't really care
about income or borders or anything like that. We've got
the delta variant is much more contagious, right, That's certainly
something we hear. I was talking with a doctor yesterday
and they said, yeah, but it's not like your outcome
is worse, meaning if you've got the vaccine, you're likely
to get through it. Are we likely to get to
a stage, especially since a big part of the world

(10:21):
is still not vaccinated, they are available hosts to continue
the variations uh in covid. Are we likely to get
to a mutation that is not only more contagious but
more a killer. It's hard to know. I mean, I
think one of the general rules of viruses, you know,
in a big picture sense, is that like a very effective,
a virus that kills its host very quickly is not

(10:43):
a very good virus because it makes it harder for
you know, it makes it harder for her to spread.
I mean, a bola is really really scary, but as
a virus attends to the reason it tends to say
relatively self contained is because it kills people too quickly
before they can, you know, end up walking around and
spreading it to lots and lots of people. It's very
scary for healthcare workers. Is very scary if it's happening

(11:04):
in your village, you know, but there's much less risk
that you know, someone gets a bowla and then has
a mind you know, you don't have a mild case
of a bowla that you're walking, you know, walking around
with infecting lots and lots of other people. So, um,
you know, yeah, I mean this this, this question of
you know, the global issue is a is a real one. Um.
And and you know the failure of of richer nations

(11:25):
to effectively contribute to kovacs in other ways, you know,
and really help push vaccinations in in in other places.
I mean that is that is meaningful. And then you
mentioned some of this data sharing stuff. I mean, I
think another real issue that is going to come up
over and over again and is going to be I
I hope a point of consideration after this, you know
pandemic ends is you know, we do need probably a

(11:45):
better system of surveillance and monitoring and fast action from
a global standpoint, because I think you really saw and
have seen over the course of this pandemic. You know
what happens when information when countries don't share information um
as as rap with lye as they might otherwise. Um,
you know, and now we're trying to track variants and
you know, I mean that is still system that's kind

(12:06):
of in its infancy in terms of you know, growing
up and having global genetic surveillance of these viruses. When
you wake up every morning and there's a ton of
headlines when it comes to COVID and the vaccines and
the variants, I mean, what is it that you're always
looking for? Top of mind? I think, you know, we're
kind of at the point in this where it's you know,
I personally am really more thinking about the kind of

(12:27):
the long outcome here. I think there's you know, there's
new fresh headlines every day, you know, really, but though
you know, the main thing I think we're keeping an
eye on right now is, you know, where are people
getting sick and why are they getting sick? Um? You know,
and be they vaccinated or unvaccinated? What do we really know? Um?
And what can we find out more to learn and

(12:47):
add information about, you know, how effective these vaccines are,
how the virus is evolving. I mean, those are the
things that we're really paying attention to because all that
points to a time when you know, what is the
you know, hopeful end point of this of this pandemic mick,
you know, if there is one, or do we just
end up kind of in a long tail endemic situation
where we're dealing with this virus and living with it
in some way or another for the rest of our lives,

(13:09):
which is very possible. Yes, all right, gonna leave with her.
Thank you so much. It's what I wanted to do today.
So thank you so much. I know you're a busy guy,
Drew Armstrong. He's our senior editor for US healthcare right
here at Bloomberg News. Check him out his work on
the Bloomberg Terminal, also at Bloomberg dot com. To thank
you so much.