Just how stupid are we, really? We're all locked up due to a virus that went around the world in months. If there's a variant anywhere that the vaccines don't work on, then this is just a selective breeding program we're setting up. We'll all get the vaccine and then go out and catch the new one because we stopped the quarantine.
In this case, yes, as people are vaccinated, variants that evade vaccines will spread more easily than others. From what we've seen so far, these same variants tend to be more contagious regardless, so that likely would have been the case anyway. By vaccinating though, you achieve a few things. First, you protect people from the variants that are susceptible, saving a lot of lives in the short term. Second, you massively cut down transmissions of the virus, each of which gives it an opportunity to mutate and produce new variants. Third, in most cases, you do provide some protection even against resistant variants.
And finally, just as the virus is not static, neither will be the vaccines. Work is already underway to update all the major vaccines to cover the new variants, and that process should be much faster than creating the initial vaccines (in design, trials, and roll-out). So it will be possible to vaccinate against variants that evade current vaccines.
Yes, it will take a while, and it would be nice if the virus would just sit still and not mutate. But we're still far, far better off with vaccines than without them. You are correct though that other measures will need to remain in place for some time as well.
Any introductory textbook on virology will explain that we can’t cure influenza, rhinovirus or coronavirus for exactly the reasons Hinkley outlined.
In related news, the press doesn’t do interviews with virologists. Instead, they talk to epidemiologists, sociologists and psychiatrists.
That’s strange, since those people aren’t experts on viruses, and they certainly aren’t experts on coronavirus. Where are the articles that consult coronavirus experts? It’s been a field of study for decades.
It may be the case for B 1.1.7 (but around 30%, not the 70% originally flaunted by the UK government and the media), but at this time there are no data on transmissibility of B 1.351 (the variant discussed here).
I think perhaps there's a tendency to make a mental analogy to antibiotics, where it is dangerous to expose pathogens (bacteria in that case) to antibiotics without wiping them out completely, because you encourage resistance. There are a couple differences here though. First of all, we have a limited number of viable antibiotics, but these vaccines can be continually adapted to target changes in the virus.
More importantly though, the interaction between the two is different. It's not that the virus is being exposed to the vaccine and selecting for mutations that avoid it within a host, as bacteria might do in response to an insufficient round of antibiotics. It's simply that the vaccine will protect against the strands it can, which will leave us with the ones that resist vaccines. That situation is better than the one where we're being infected by all strains!
An exception would be if there were vaccine resistant strains that caused more severe illness than non-resistant ones, and that infection with a non-resistant strain also protected against these resistant strains, whereas the vaccine didn't. That isn't the case now though, and such a strain is unlikely to develop, because immunity from vaccines tends to be stronger than natural immunity. (So if anything, the opposite is true - even against resistant strains people are likely to be better off with vaccine-based than natural immunity.)