The only people saying that the vaccine only lasts six months are vaccine company CEOs. The fact is that we aren't seeing a surge of serious illness in healthcare workers who were vaccinated 6 or 7 months ago, so I think we can relax somewhat.

There are other factors including natural immunity, the tendency for subsequent infections to be milder in MOST individuals.

All pandemics end. And virtually all hospitalizations and deaths in the US at present, including in areas where delta is representing 80% of sequenced infections, are in vaccinated people.

Give it time and COVID-19 will not be a disease we particularly worry about, although I do suspect we'll see more masks appear in flu season, esp. as masking as been demonstrated to be VERY effective against influenza.

But no, we won't be masking and social distancing forever. We can't eliminate COVID, but there's a huge difference between something which presents us with occasional outbreaks and a novel virus exploding through an immunologically naive population.

We no longer have an immunologically naive population and interestingly enough the symptoms of COVID are changing from being predominantly a lower respiratory infection to being predominantly an UPPER respiratory infection...that is to say a head cold. Eventually, COVID will become similar to OC43, another human coronavirus that causes colds (albeit often a bit worse than typical), and which may have been responsible for a pandemic in the1890s that had the same symptoms as COVID-19.

Sorry, I'm rambling on here.