Well we know it mutates and unless it dies out it will continue to do so.
Virology and this type of coronavirus are clearly very complicated and only deeply understood by people who are very bright and know a great deal about it, basically excluding nearly everybody including me. But there's nothing to stop the ordinary herbert doing a crude thought experiment..
Take a middling mutation, perhaps an amalgam of what we have seen so far, as a baseline.
A new mutation can be more or less infectious, more or less deadly (severe), and more or less vaccine resistant. Other dimensions exist but using those 3, you would say that of 8 permutations of better and worse, one of the 8 is a serious problem - more severe, more infectious, more vaccine resistant. 4 of the 8 are not vaccine resistant and of the remaining 3 all are either less infectious, less severe, or both. But a more severe, more infectious, more vaccine resistant one will emerge from time to time.
It seems likely to me that vaccines that are updated periodically might well be necessary to get on top of Covid and prevent a repetition. Herd immunity would only really work with a virus that doesn't easily mutate - otherwise the virus only has to survive somewhere, possibly dormant, for it to come back and mutate at some point and recreate the same havoc.
If and when the emergency recedes, the politicians and the public will decide whether we continue mass vaccination as a preventative precaution. I fear that the politicians will choose not to spend the money on it, and if they do, much of the population won't see the need for a jab. If that is the case, we could have further pandemics from time to time. We should also not forget that much of the world has still to make real progress with vaccination anyway and there will probably always be a reservoir of infection somewhere.
We can hope for a magic bullet of course. That many people can now live with HIV is almost miraculous, but it would be foolish to assume that science can always win.
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