Honest question here, do vaccines actually reduce the chance for covid to mutate? Spitballing, I would expect a vaccine to decrease the number of total mutations that can occur but also simultaneously increase the selective pressure on the virus, increasing the chance that any mutations that improve the virus’ ability to resist the vaccine become dominant.

To make an analogy, does spraying every surface in a hospital with an antibacterial solution result in no bacteria or just make it more likely to see resistant bacteria? I’d guess it’s a function of how potent the solution was and how well every last surface was coated. If you start with a 10% solution, don’t achieve full coverage and keep ramping up slowly perhaps we’ll just see something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8

Agree with the rest of your post though.