I've been learning a good bit about the possible vaccines in my pharmacology class and if I am required to take it, I feel no qualms doing so. Of course it depends on the source, but there are a couple of candidates out there with relatively high efficacy rates at the moment that could potentially be released. Unless it gets an emergency release order and doesn't finish up phase 3 testing, a detailed background about the symptoms of the vaccine should be released by the time it comes out.
Of course, hopefully they don't go full release of the vaccine until people who are at high risk for the more severe side effects of covid are addressed. Personally, I have no contact with anyone whom I know is in danger of being strongly effected by this (although there's only so much you can predict), I'd rather the elderly or those with chronic illness be treated before me.
In other words if COVID really is fundamentally like flu that means you can get it over and over again. Especially since most diseases work like that. What means that herd immunity is at best herd resistance and the problem will not solve itself out on it's own. Since diseases don't really work like that for the most part.
This is not necessarily correct. People get the flu more than once because antigen markers on the surface of the virus change with different flu strains and do so often, which makes it difficult to combat. From my understanding, I don't think we know if covid is this way or not yet. Yes, we know that sars can also make different strains like other viruses, but it has not been suggested that the reason is the prior (to my awareness, the detection process for covid has remained relatively the same and there has been no sign of massive change in markers, but if I am wrong I don't mind being corrected on this). Studies suggest that possible other reasons are because covid can stay dormant in peoples bodies overtime (like chicken pocks/shingles), or because when the body mounts an immune response, there is a finite period of times that memory cells capable of recognizing covid stay within the body or for various other reasons.
You make a reasonable point about herd immunity though. The biggest thing is going to rely on people making safe choices and the vaccine being effective enough to work for a sustained period of time or that it gets out to enough people that the problem can be minimized to those who are more likely to be able to "handle" the virus. It's definitely not going to be a problem that just goes away, I'm hoping once the vaccines or a more suitable care method comes out, it becomes somewhat more "akin" to how we handle the flu and that death rates can be minimized.
Edit: Or rather minimized to a degree where the health industry will be able to handle it in addition to other virus's that go around.