| Africa is already fighting the coronavirus pandemic with one hand tied behind its back. There's little access to vaccines, and many countries have dysfunctional health systems. Now it has a new problem: Variants are proliferating across the continent, threatening to derail a vaccine program before it's even really begun. The B.1.351 strain, first identified in South Africa late last year, is now dominant across the southern part of the continent and is making inroads into East Africa, according to Tulio de Oliveira, the director of Krisp, a South African genomics institute. That's problematic. In addition to being more transmissible, South African studies found it could reinfect those who had caught the original version of the virus. A small study showed that AstraZeneca's vaccine, the most commonly available shot on the continent, was less effective in combating it.  Health-care workers register to receive a dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Photographer: MLUNGISI MBELE/AFP As if that weren't enough, a recently identified strain, which traces its roots back to the virus originally found in Wuhan, is becoming dominant in Rwanda and Uganda. It's rapidly spreading along trucking routes. While more research is still needed, its large number of mutations is concerning. Ominously, it has the E484K mutation on the spike protein seen in the variant found first in South Africa. That means it may allow the virus to slip past the body's immune defenses more easily. For now there's little Africa can do but gather data and try to control movements that may exacerbate the spread of the mutated viruses. Krisp is leading a group of authorities in more than 40 African countries to track the spread of variants across the continent. Ultimately the only way to defeat the virus is to vaccinate enough people so that it has less chance to mutate. With just 20 million people vaccinated on a continent of 1.3 billion, that day isn't coming any time soon. "We need to control the introduction of new variants and scale vaccinations," de Oliveira says. "We don't have vaccines. It has to be a wake-up call."—Antony Sguazzin | 
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