What you're seeing in Europe may be resulting from the fact that they lifted their restrictions early, not so much that it's BA.2 that's there.

Andy Pekosz

This virus has shown that it mutated slowly, but when it started to pick up good mutations, they just kept coming and coming and coming.

We also need to realize case numbers are one of the things that [are] driving the likelihood of this virus acquiring mutations that make it more transmissible, if it’s a 1 in a million chance, we’ve let the dice roll 900,000 times because we haven’t been able to control cases out there. Controlling case numbers is going to be the most critical thing we do to lessen the likelihood of more variants.

I think that the vaccine and national infection provide enough immunity that we’re not going to see huge numbers of cases of the new variants coming through, they may slow down the rate at which case numbers go down, but I think everything I’ve seen so far about immune responses suggests that these variants are still susceptible to the immunity induced by vaccine or infection.

Both types of immune responses will help us, but we really want to focus on getting the vaccination campaign up and going because that’s the stronger immunity and the longer lasting immunity.