The number of variants that arise is proportional to the amount of the virus in circulation. Vaccination reduces the number of variants.
I'm not sure where you get this information, but lets look at the way I came to my uneducated conclusion.
First, thanks for conceding that you're not an expert. Neither am I. Neither are most others in this forum. But not everyone admits that. The basis of my point above is that a variant is simply a copying error. The more instances of copying there are, the more variants will be produced. The more of a virus there is in circulation, the more variants will arise. Some worse, some not so bad, some not viable at all.
Corona Viruses have been around since the 1930s, and there haven't been many variants until fairly recently, now we suddenly seem to have variants almost every day. So I wondered what was causing this.
They were around for a long time before they were identified. And there are plenty of variants of common coronaviruses... it's just that they're not a concern if not deadly. A variant is simply a copying error. The reason there are so many viable variants of Covid-19 is that there is a lot of the virus in circulation.
Natural selection will tend to give preference to variants with modified envelopes
I will not deny that vaccines exert selection pressure on a virus. But this isn't as important a factor as the amount of virus in circulation. If vaccines reduce the amount of virus by providing immunity and reducing spread (which they do), then this vastly outweighs any selection pressure they exert. Consider antibiotic resistance in the case of bacteria... it makes sense not to administer antibiotics for trivial reasons, but no-one is suggesting that we stop using antibiotics entirely. Besides which, even if vaccines did exert a considerable selection pressure, it's a two-horse race... vaccines are modified to combat new variants of concern, as with the annual flu shot.
medical opinion advises that vaccines are not needed where strong natural immunity is present. Again, this is the fist vaccine that goes against this advice.
There is no strong natural immunity. This is a novel coronavirus; it has not been encountered before. There is no pre-existing immunity. The two routes through which an individual can contribute to herd immunity are a) take the vaccine, or b) catch the virus. There's no third route.
It is obvious that vaccination against Covid has nothing to do with health, and everything to do with wealth transfer and population control.
I agree that in our country the Tories are interested in exploiting the population for their own gain. But the system has been set up this way and has been working fine for them for a long time now. They don't need to wreck a system that is already rigged hugely in their favour. And population control is irrelevant, it controls itself in time, the five stage demographic transition model is well understood.