One can only wonder if it's simply a matter of time before variants break through vaccines in the US too.
The speed of the virus is much faster than the speed of the public health infrastructure. Maybe upping the tempo of our human controlled reaction is something we can focus on in this pandemic.
The 1918 H1N1 pandemic just evolved into seasonal influenza (or co-evolved with the human immune system). In 1957 the H1N1 virus left the human race and was displaced by H2N2. It mutated in pigs for 50 years, then the H1 protein came back in the 2009 triple reassortment pandemic. That pandemic had minimal impact though because people who were exposed to H1N1 before 1957 still had partial immunity through cross reactive T-cells to the H1 envelope protein -- even after it had evolved in pigs for 50 years.
Immunity is very non-binary. There is "survivor island style immunity" which is sterilizing immunity that prevents an individual from being infected. But there's a lot of partial immunity that just takes the edge off the disease, even though the virus may still spread epidemically.
A booster shot has already been developed, and I expect we'll be able to win the arms race against this virus.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.06.21254882v...
An actual immune-escaping variant is going to have to do more than just a few mutations and will have to substantially change along 20 or so different epitopes of the spike protein, which will almost certainly come at a cost to fitness.
It probably will eventually do that and it'll become endemic, but won't be anywhere near as transmissible or virulent as it has been.
You can do more than wonder! You can look at the facts and see no evidence that any variant to date can evade the existing vaccines to the point that they are no longer useful.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/icmr-says-covaxin-...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/covaxin-shows-78-o...
According to this Twitter person: https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/138482553989517312...
>Covaxin is the inactivated virus-based COVID-19 vaccine being developed with Bharat Biotech and Covishield is the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine being manufactured locally by the Serum Institute of India under that name.
>So inactivated vaccines tend to have lower immunogenicity on average (when we look back on past vaccines). I would like to think if Covaxin neutralizes it, the others would likely do so as well. We will definitely need data but this is very promising