Lambda is just one of a "whole slew" of variants the Public Health Agency of Canada is keeping an eye on, said Tam, and watching how much is it spreading and how it will respond to vaccines.
"We're just trying to gather up some information on who it is that's having the Lambda variant right now, but there's very few cases at this point," she said.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, said there has been a pattern of panicking that vaccines won't work every time there is a new variant.
"It's like 'Oh no, new mutations,' but actually Lamda doesn't really have new mutations, it just has new combinations of mutations that we've already seen before," she said.