How likely do you think that is? The vaccines work well (several work sufficiently well against the known mutations) and it is likely they can be updated to work against new strains.
The current production capacity for mRNA vaccines isn't enough to quickly give much of the planet a booster shot, but it isn't unimaginable to scale it to that point.
We could also just use social distancing to eradicate it. Not a mix of half measures, real lock downs and tracing and quarantines. It would vanish in a puff of coordinated effort.
> We could also just use social distancing to eradicate it. Not a mix of half measures, real lock downs and tracing and quarantines. It would vanish in a puff of coordinated effort.
It's a big world. You may lock down a city. That's easy(ish). A country is harder, but do-able for one with either a strong central government or strong social cohesion. But the whole world? All two hundred plus countries? And if any one country fails, if the borders aren't 100% tight, it can get out. That leaves you with tracing and quarantines in the countries that had eradicated it, which is do-able if it doesn't cross the border too frequently.
Is Afghanistan going to fully lock down? Is Yemen? Syria? How many countries are going to fail? How many countries do we have to quarantine every single visitor, and for how long?
The vaccine may get us out of this. Social distancing without the vaccine might be kind of workable, if everything goes right, but it would leave us in less-than-ideal circumstances for a very long time.
I suppose my point is that we are choosing the path (collectively anyway) where we deal with it forever. We have effective tools, but we don't want to use them because it's hard.
I don't think vaccine adoption will be high enough to create herd immunity, and if we could use social distancing to eradicate the virus we would have by now, so I think it's more likely than folks think it is that social distancing and mask wearing will be our new normal for a least a few more years.
Or... people could just give up, and our death rates will skyrocket, and it'll just be the US's national shame. I also think that's a real possibility.
Some good news is that lots of vulnerable people are choosing to get vaccinated when given the opportunity, so death rates should decline even if we screw the rest of it up.
"[...I]mplementing large scale vaccination while large numbers of infected people interact with immunized people sounds like an efficient way to discover vaccine-escaping strains. This vaccine-escaping selection should be more than offset by the fact that vaccination will result in fewer infections and lessen the opportunity for more, worse strains to evolve.
Still, it would be better if we could avoid exposing a huge population of immunized people to a huge population of infected people. It's obvious everything would be better with fewer infected people, but it's still dawning on some that benefits include fewer strains and maybe more effective vaccination impacts."
Hopefully the J&J vaccine gets approved and continues to work well. It is much more practical to send everywhere than the mRNA vaccines. Then the trick is to get wealthier countries to commit to making it widely available.
(We can do the same with the Russian and Chinese vaccines if they are suitable; but the point is that it would be nice to see world leaders start talking about widespread vaccination as a global issue)
The current production capacity for mRNA vaccines isn't enough to quickly give much of the planet a booster shot, but it isn't unimaginable to scale it to that point.
We could also just use social distancing to eradicate it. Not a mix of half measures, real lock downs and tracing and quarantines. It would vanish in a puff of coordinated effort.