All I know is I sense a drastic change in tone from you guys from when the vaccines were beginning to be approved early December time, and it makes me anxious.
The government has simply not reacted to the rise in cases post lock down 2.
The new variant is part of this, but also the more general strategy to allow numbers to rise until hospitals are in trouble is at the root of it.
Numbers have now been allowed to get so out of hand vaccinating alone can't solve the problem.
We have to get cases down, or we'll simply infect the entire country before we can vaccinate.
I'm much less worried in the short term about vaccine effectiveness against emerging strains. There seems to be low risk there.
Longer term, attempting to vaccinate during a huge outbreak means there is much more driving force for mutations (the virus is much more exposed to vaccinated, or worse partially vaccinated subjects, so vaccine resistant mutations are selected for). We don't know how likely this is, but again, this makes reducing prevalence imperative.
The good news is that the genetically engineered nature of these vaccines makes developing one against a new variant much easier than would historically have been the case.