Does it block the exploit? No. That's the job of a patch. Trying to block things at the exploit level is a fruitless and failing job. Does it prevent the exploit from successfully loading a virus or trojan or other threat onto your computer? Most of the time, and more times than others, and if it doesn't block it immediately, it can still remove it afterwards with complete success. Patches are always the best answer for blocking, since the ones the article said blocked the exploit were only able to block the exploit in those lab tests and not in several other tests. Since exploits come a dime a dozen every week, trying to keep up with blocking exploits is pretty much useless. Blocking the stuff the exploit tries to do is much more effective.
Sorry, I can't see every post Techfox's response is correct - we don't bother trying to block individual exploits, we take the entrypoint into account and then just block the threat itself. That's why WSA just whitelisted leak tests.