Dr. Ben Reis, Director of the Predictive Medicine Group at Harvard Medical School and the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, joined KTLA to discuss his latest study on the COVID-19 vaccines and coronavirus variants.
He said the variant first identified in Britain appears to be covered by current vaccines, but there are other variants being looked at to determine the effectiveness of the vaccines against them.
“All the data we’ve seen so far, all of these variants, may lead to slightly lower effectiveness of the vaccines,” Reis said. “In other words, we haven’t seen a variant that break throughs the vaccine, maybe the 95% goes down to 87% effectiveness, but that’s still a very strong case for getting vaccinated.”
This segment aired on the KTLA 5 Morning News on April 23, 2021.