Welcome to Thoughts in the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross Asset Stragist for

Morgan Stanley Research, and I'm Matthew Harrison, Equity Research Analyst covering

biotechnology. And today on part one of this podcast, we'll be addressing concerns over

COVID-19 variants and hotspots and talk about the state of vaccinations globally. It's Thursday,

June 24th at 2pm in London and 9am in New York. So Matt, I was thinking back to last year

around April when you and I did our first episode about the coronavirus. And while it's

comforting to have more certainty around the virus than we did in those early days of lockdown,

news around variants tells us that while we all might be through with the virus,

it's perhaps not quite through with us. So maybe let's start with your outlook for variants

and global hotspots, given some of the recent news around spread in different parts of the world.

As I look across the data, I think vaccine hesitancy is becoming more of an issue than vaccine

supply. I know we've talked about that in detail previously. And then secondly, I think

the issue of not new mutations but new variants. And I think this is a bit of a nuanced topic,

but important to discuss. And what I mean here is I think we've seen many of the mutations

that were likely to find, but the combinations of these mutations tends to be what causes more

issues. And so for example, while the mutations in the Delta variant we have seen before,

we haven't seen them together in the same way that they are in the Delta variant. And so

this variant obviously which emerged from India is causing more of concern globally as it becomes

more dominant. And that's because people still aren't vaccinated and this variant can spread

quite quickly in those populations. So that's a great kind of segue into the question around

vaccinations and how effective there'll be against these variants. What does the data suggest?

Are there differences that we see between the different vaccines or the amount of vaccination

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