Jessica Malaty Rivera:
It really does, because we know that viruses mutate, we know that variants can emerge, and we know that that can especially happen in the context of having a large percentage of the population unvaccinated. We’ve just hit the 51% mark of people in the United States being fully vaccinated. That presents a vulnerability for us. And we know that variants like Delta emerged in the absence of vaccines in India, and we expect for that to continue to happen. And so in an effort to get ahead of new variants that are emerging in an effort to understand kind of the continued efficacy of these vaccines, we need that data. Now, we do have some data that has proven that these vaccines are still very effective against the Delta variant. But now, as you’ve seen in the headlines, we’re talking about boosters because we want to ensure that we are not allowing people who get vaccinated to have any possible additional risk of having severe outcomes.
