Welcome to Thoughts in the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, chief cross-asset strategist for

Morgan Stanley. And I'm Matthew Harrison, equity research analyst covering biotechnology.

And today on the podcast, we'll be talking about new variants of COVID-19, the booster

market, and the road ahead for vaccinations. It's Thursday, February 11th at 3 p.m. in

London. And 10 a.m. here in New York.

So Matthew, I'm really glad we have a chance to speak today because I feel that when

you open up the newspaper, you read the news, there are these two very different narratives

about what's going on with COVID-19 at the moment. On the one hand, there's a very

worrying narrative that we're getting new variants. And the other story is much more optimistic.

The vaccination is progressing quite rapidly, maybe somewhat better than expected in the

US and the UK. So as you step back and you look across kind of the wide variety of data

that you look at regarding COVID-19, I think a good place to start is kind of where do

you think the story is taking us from my perspective, I probably fall more on the optimistic

side. And let me give you a couple points that probably put me there. So the first one

is if I look at the efficiency of vaccine distribution in the US, we've moved from a situation

where a month ago, only about 20% of shots that were distributed were getting into arms.

And now we're north of 70%. So the efficiency of the operation is improving. The second

thing is the supply of vaccines in the US has pretty much been on target with what the

manufacturers were estimating. So we haven't had supply issues. Clearly demand is outstripping

supply and that remains to be something that we can fix. But the efficiency of the operation

is improving. And then the second item is variants are potentially concerning. The data

that we have so far on vaccine efficacy against variants is such that while it may be slightly

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