The efficacy of coronavirus vaccines may be reduced against the virus variant dominant in India but they can still offer protection against severe conditions linked to COVID-19, one of the country's top experts in genomics said on Friday. "Even before these variants, a person who was infected had an 80 per cent protection at six months, according to a study in the UK. So reinfections can occur with a normal virus as well, it does not have to be a variant," Dr Anurag Agarwal, Director of the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, told NDTV.