Should we be concerned about the B.1.617 (India) variant?

I'm sure you've heard that things are really bad in India. They had been able to keep the pandemic mostly under control until recently, when a new variant emerged. That variant is B.1.617, and it contains several key mutations that have been seen in other variants. It has the E484Q mutation, which is thought to confer resistance to antibodies from earlier infection.

This raises the question of whether or not this variant is likely to be resistant to the vaccines. I found one study where antibodies from Pfizer-vaccinated people were tested on the B.1.617 (India) variant vs the B.1.351 (SA) variant vs the original variant. The result was that for most people the antibodies were the best at neutralizing the original, then the India variant, then SA. In the graphs shown here, the black lines are the original, green is the SA variant, and orange is the India variant. The 15 boxes are 15 different people. So apparently vaccine-elicited antibodies are better at fighting the India variant than they are at fighting the SA variant.

The B.1.351 (SA) variant remains the worst in terms of evading the immune response to the vaccines and the older variants of the virus. The AZ vaccine doesn't work against this variant at all. Fortunately, the others do, although probably with somewhat reduced efficacy. And of course, there are efforts underway now to create updated vaccines to this variant.

Link to study : https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.04.442663v1.full.pdf