If you think the purpose of a vaccine is eradication....

[PuzzledObserver]

“We’ve only ever eradicated one virus, and that took 200 years.”

leads to

“We can’t eradicate COVID”

leads to

“We may as well go back to normal now/ there’s no point in being vaccinated”

I want to point out that these logical leaps are..... well..... illogical. Nice as it would be to eradicate Covid, it’s really not necessary to do that to enable us to live with it in the way that we do with.... oh.... flu, say.

It’s not “just like flu”, because it is more transmissible and much more likely to kill you than flu, as well as the inconvenient fact that the vast majority of the population are still susceptible to it. But if we vaccinated a lot of people (not everyone, just a lot), the death rate as a proportion of the population could be reduced to the point that it WAS no worse than flu.

And maybe then society would be willing to live with it, and precautions could be lifted.

Yes! Totally agree. Not everyone will be vaccinated anyway, it will mainly be the elderly, vulnerable and healthcare staff. Once these groups are vaccinated we will be able to get back to normal. If there is no vaccine we will have to live with it anyway, so a vaccine is a bonus.

Vaccines have not erradicated many viruses indeed, but they have reduced the spread and effects of almost each disease they have been made for, to the point of amost nil cases (for example tetanus), and much milder effects if caught ( like chickenpox).
So exactly as you say in your post.
I do reckon though that all of us will get the vaccine. Maybe not at first, as they are meant to do large groups studies before going in mass numbers. But yes once the vaccine has passed all the testing regime.

I and my kids have taken flu shots every year and I never expected it to eradicate the flu, the reason we take it because we seen how a simple respiratory virus infection affect our asthma. Oxygen level got so low that it put us at a risk of brain damages.

We are scared of the flu which can take us longer to recover. So we felt the flu shot will shorten and lessen the severity of it because we developed the right immunity for it .