chris beyrer of the johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health. think about how the vaccines relate into this equation, should we be recalibrating them to account for the variant, should we just be giving everyone a third shot of the vaccines that already exist? dr. beyrer: the first most important thing to say is we are only at 51% of all americans who are eligible for a vaccine being fully immunized. the first and most important thing is many more people need to be immunized. we have three safe and highly efficacious vaccines with emergency use authorization, and we are not using them enough. number two, we probably will see a recommendation on boosters, but for people with immunosuppression and immunocompromised. right now the data is suggesting the vaccines we have are holding up robustly against serious disease with delta. what we are seeing is an epidemic of the unvaccinated. kailey: the vaccines seem to be holding up against delta but i'm reading about the lambda variant which may be more resistant. it seems the variants just keep coming. h

chris beyrer. chris: that was a perfect segue, maureen. because of fierce persistence of new infections, really the problem of h.i.v. incidents, is exactly what the prevention science part of the conference is trying to address. and i think we all have understood that there was a tremendous effort on the part of just countless providers, clinicians, pepfar, national governments to ensure that in the covid pandemic there were not treatment interruptions. everybody understood the centrality of trying to keep people on treatment. but many, many health care that you would put in the category of elective, like, for example, do i need an h.i.v. test today? is it worth going to the clinic and risking exposure to covid? or should i refill that prescription? these really, i think, were more profoundly effective than the treatment area. so we're going to be analyzing for a very long time the impact of covid-19 on that aspect of the h.i.v. pandemic. but we should be clear based on the 2019 data, and everybody will remember that 2020 was supposed to b