I really don't see how we can avoid this. I think it will take too long to create a vaccine, and there will be mutations and recombinations that reduce vaccine effectiveness. I'd love to be wrong though.
Oversimplifying, it is recommended for people with more than 65(50) years, people with chronic diseases or HIV, and pregnant women and babies from 6 month to 5(2) years. Also people that work or live with them. But each country has it's own rules and recommendations.
I stopped getting the flu shots in my 20s because I would always get sick despite the shot. I was convinced in my mid-30s to start getting them again. I still get sick, but it's not as bad as when I skipped the shots.
(I know at least a couple times I ended up getting the shot that prevented a variant that we didn't get. There's enough of a time gap that the shot isn't causing the symptoms.)
If you are young and healthy, I don't think they are pestering you for your sake, but to build immunity and prevent its spread. Healthy people should really look at flu shots as a kind of duty to their fellow citizens, who may be more vulnerable.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2015001/article...
It's recommended for anyone with frequent contact with children.
Some viruses just peter out, but I don't assume this one will just because it's possible. Some virus become endemic, but why would we assume that about this virus either?
Now, resistance does fade and to keep your dog protected you need to give it a booster shot every year or two and it might very well be the same with humans and SARS-2. But at least we wouldn't have to play the game of guessing which strain would be dominant in an upcoming season.
This really hinges on whether the vaccine confers long-term immunity. If it works like the flu vaccine, then being endemic is inevitable.
People often have differing immunity to a flu based on their past exposures. People that had been exposed to the 1950s strain were not hit as hard by the H1N1 that emerged in 1977: https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15
There is a possible ecological solution - we drive the dangerous strains to extinction by deliberately spreading a harmless strain. Unfortunately few people seem interested in investigating this idea.
Interesting idea - what's to stop the harmless one from mutating back though?
Presumably it'd be engineered to be both a) harmless to humans and b) spread better than existing SARS/COV strains.
If that super spreader then mutated to become harmful to humans we could end up in a worse spot, no?
The harmless strain doesn’t have to spread naturally better than the dangerous strains and it is likely any harmless strain would not spread better. We can artificially spread the harmless strain around so even if it is less contagious than the dangerous strain we tip the ecological balance in favour of harmless strain. This is really how an attenuated vaccine like the Sabin polio vaccine works from an ecological perspective.
The risk of the virus mutating is there right now. It is much less likely that a harmless strain becomes very dangerous than a dangerous strain become very dangerous. This would be a bigger jump in evolutionary space.
Ultimately as the immediate downvoting of my OP suggests this idea doesn’t appear popular. This doesn’t mean that it is not a scientifically valid approach that could work.