Right now, it all feels very hopeless: the government agenda right now is for people to be terrified and depressed, so they are laying the doom and gloom on thick, because they want people to "behave" over Christmas, as it was the one time when the public are difficult to control. It all seems very hopeless right now, because the government want us to feel that way. And I'm saying that with less cynicism than usual. It's painfully obvious that the government are manipulating us like this, using the press. This is nothing new - Tony Blair was a master of doing this, but he was more skilled and subtle with it. I'm one of those who suspects that announcing the "new strain" was a way to get the people to "behave", which backfired when the rest of the world took the announcement seriously.
This government spinning can work both ways. At some point, they will decide it's time to "reverse the scaremongering", perhaps when they realise we're running out of money to keep funding lockdown, and when rates finally do go down. Sooner or later, they will need the public to be socialising and spending. Remember how they tried to make it happen in the summer, with "eat out to help out" being just one of the ways? So even if the vaccine is not working, the government will pretend it is, and will fiddle the figures to make it look as if it is working, just like it did to make the virus look absolutely terrible and deadly when they need to scare the public.
Call me a conspiracist if you will, but it's what governments do, or try to: they always have, they always will. Boris just isn't very good at it.