Worse problems with SARS-CoV-2 variants may be on the way The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), continues to spread globally. With this spread, new variants and strains have emerged, posing a threat to the recently developed and distributed SARS-CoV-2 vaccines' efficacy. Researchers at the Department of Integrative Biomedical Sciences, University of Cape Town, South Africa, found evidence of a significant change in the selective forces acting on immunologically important SARS-CoV-2 genes, such as N and S. These likely coincided with the emergence of the 501Y lineages. In the study, published in the pre-print server