Will Your Vaccine Work Against Delta?

Here’s the latest news from the global pandemic.

In this week's edition of the Covid Q&A, we look at vaccines and the delta variant. In hopes of making this very confusing time just a little less so, each week Bloomberg Prognosis is picking one question sent in by readers and putting it to experts in the field. This week's question comes to us from Hillary. With the delta variant on the rise, Hillary wonders how well vaccines protect against this new version of the virus. She asks:

How well does the AstraZeneca vaccine fare against the delta variant?

With the delta variant quickly spreading, this is truly the question of the hour. This mutation of the virus is highly contagious, and fast becoming dominant in many countries. In the U.S., new research from the genome-editing firm Helix suggests that already as many as 40% of new cases are delta. The good news is vaccines appear to be quite effective against this variant.

”All the vaccines seem to work against the delta variant,” says Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease expert at University of California San Francisco. Gandhi says even among the rare cases where vaccinated people contract delta, the symptoms are typically mild.