Delta variant is getting people in the public health world nervous: Doctor

Dr. Manish Garg, Emergency Medicine Physician & Co-Founder of World Academic Council of Emergency Medicine, joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the latest on the coronavirus pandemic.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: I want to pivot now to talk about the coronavirus pandemic because we do have some encouraging news. Protection against the coronavirus from the vaccine could last for years. I want to bring in Dr. Manish Garg. He's an emergency medicine physician and co-founder of the World Academic Council of Emergency Medicine.

Doctor, always great to have you here with us. So I do want to start with this new news. Essentially, what does this mean? Does this mean that we don't necessarily need boosters come the fall time? Or what does it mean that we're protected for years, instead of months, as some had thought?

MANISH GARG: So hi, Kristin. It's so wonderful to see you again. Thank you for having me on the show. My thoughts are my own. So I just want to say that I want to pump the brakes a little bit on this news. I think it's very, very exciting and encouraging. Basically, these researchers are looking at memory B cells in our body. And just as a very quick kind of refresher, it's essentially like our body is way of identifying when there's a foreign invader, and then our body makes these memory B cells and then creates antibodies to protect us. And in this case, against COVID.

And what the hypothesis is of these researchers is that if you were infected with COVID and then received the vaccine, you may have lifelong immunity. And so that's very, very exciting. If you have been vaccinated without the previous infection, they think you may need a booster. But right now, when we look at the data, it seems that the folks who've had the booster shot-- sorry, who've had the regular mRNA vaccine, that they do very well against certain variants, particularly right now, the Delta variant, which is out there.

So there's statistics that are out that it's about 85% to 88% still effective against the Delta variant. And that's very promising, particularly as the case counts go down, the hospitalizations are going down, the deaths are going down. And as long as your community doesn't have a large amount of spread, there's really nowhere for this virus to travel.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: What about for folks who didn't get the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine? Because we are international here at Yahoo Finance. People who have been given the AstraZeneca vaccine may be listening to this interview, also people who got the J&J vaccine. What does it mean for those people?

MANISH GARG: So, yeah, hi, Alexis. That's a great question. So I think that their risk of potential infection is going to be higher. And one of the things that was found in a recent study that they actually put out today was that if you go ahead and mix and match some of these vaccines, that will also provide you protection. Your risk of having an infection is a little bit higher with the J&J and AstraZeneca than it is with one of the mRNA vaccines. And we know that internationally, it's very difficult to get some of the cold storage, particularly in low and middle income regions that don't have those resources.

But the variation of hypotheses is very fascinating. The WHO just came out a few days ago saying that they recommend annual vaccine boosters for the vulnerable and boosters for everybody else after a couple of years. So as you can see, we're still trying to parse out all of the data. But [INAUDIBLE] has been very promising about the memory B cells.

KRISTIN MYERS: Doctor, I do want to ask you about that Delta variant. We have heard that it is going to become the predominant or the dominant strain here in the United States. And we're now hearing this news about that Delta Plus mutation. We've asked a couple of doctors about this. And so far, the prevailing sentiment has seemed to be, if you're vaccinated, you shouldn't worry about it too much. You are still protected.

But curious to know how much that variant, or even potentially, that mutation, seeing it as it's more transmissible, causes more severity in terms of the disease, could derail the United States, particularly in those areas in those states with much lower vaccination rates than we have, for example, here in New York.

MANISH GARG: Yeah, so I was super excited, Kristin and Alexis, to talk to you about all this really, really positive news. The warning flags are coming up internationally again, particularly with this Delta variant. The United Kingdom at this point is almost 100% with the Delta variant. The United States right now, we're 20% and climbing. We're probably in a month or two now, we'll see the Delta variant as the dominant strain.

What's interesting, when you look at some of the data that in the United Kingdom, they had 90,000 cases of COVID, 1,000 hospitalizations of which 8% of the people were fully vaccinated. So I mean, it's a problem. There was an Israeli study that just got done. And what they looked at there was about half of the people that were infected in this cohort were folks that had the vaccine.

So there are going to definitely be regions of this country who have been deliberating on vaccines. We certainly have age groups like the 2 to 12-year-olds that haven't had the opportunity yet to get vaccinated. Those groups are going to be vulnerable. And so it's the Delta variant, unfortunately, right now is a major, major concern. And any additional level of mutation that's on this variant poses risks. And it's certainly getting us and the public health world nervous, particularly when we're heading into school season that's going to be starting in September.

So we're hopeful that folks can get vaccinated. This is one of the really, really key things that you can do to be able to preserve your safety. We talk about it as an ounce of prevention is a pound of cure. But in this case, just a fraction of 1 millimeter in the form of a shot can potentially save your body weight in livelihood.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, Dr. Manish Garg, emergency medicine physician and co-founder of the World Academic Council of Emergency Medicine, thanks, as always, for joining us.