Live UpdateFrom the Liveblog of Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Expert says vaccines likely protect against Indian variant

27 April 2021, 8:30 pm Edit

An expert on the coronavirus pandemic says officials currently assess that the existing vaccines protect against the Indian variant.

Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, tells Channel 12 the variant “contains 13 mutations, the most important of which we are familiar with from other variants. We know the vaccines are effective against them and the assessment is that the vaccines will be effective against this variant too.”

However, he cautions that “we don’t know that definitively yet.”

Illustrative image: a man receives a coronavirus vaccine in Jerusalem, on March 11, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)