SA, you need to think this through.
The problem with covid-19 is not so much its mortality rate as its fast spread; it can overwhelm typical health services by a factor of ten or more. With hospitals overwhelmed, the advances made in treating the disease are worthless, and all other healthcare is crippled.
So thinking mathematically, the critical factors are: how long does it take to vaccinate an entire population, and how long does vaccine immunity last before booster shots must be given? These two give us a ratio, which is the proportion of the population that will have vaccine immunity at any time. We have a good idea of the first one. The second will only be discovered next coronavirus season. We could be OK, or we could be completely stuffed. Again.
And mutation of the virus makes it worse. Yes, vaccines can be “tweaked”, but each tweak takes time, and with each tweak we are set back to safety testing. Meanwhile, the virus has no such delays and ethical constraints.
Personally, I don’t want to be having to take a briefly tested new vaccine once or twice a year. I’d rather have a couple of months of strict lockdown and get it over with.
The success of our badly implemented, very partial “lockdowns” proves that we can rapidly stamp this out. It’s not even very difficult; during restrictions, infection rates fall almost as fast as they rise when there aren’t restrictions.