First of all, take it easy, we're just talking.
I know its not personal, I am not attacking you just your position

So we have to go to lockdowns every time a potential vaccine free mutation emerges?
No lockdowns or at least the long drawn out ones we have been having in Europe are a consequence of our Governments failure to act quickly and failure to prepare. As i have said previously Countries that acted fast closed borders or at the very least imposed proper quarantine on international arrivals and want for an elimination approach have done by far the best and there economies have all done far better then those countries that didn't.

In the future in my opinion we should be looking past lockdowns as a way of controlling this disease, but I do worry that some government wont do the things necessary to avoid them.

Of course this is just my opinion, many would just think that politicians and medical corporations are just angels with wings that only want our common good.

God no, I wouldn't trust my Government as far as I could throw them, this is not about swallowing what the government says but trusting the science and trusting the doctors and nurses.

I Have personal friends that are doctors and nurses that worked in Hospitals throughout this pandemic, I have know some of them for over 20 years and I believe them when they tell me that this was the worse thing they have ever experienced, that it felt like they were in a warzone hospital. One of them described the Covid wards to me as like deaths wards, just filled with people who had been admitted and couldn't be treated and were just waiting to die, particularly at the peak of the first wave.