With a high enough vaccination rate, even a disease with R0 of 20 can go away (COVID19 has an R0 of 3 to 6, maybe 9 if we include Delta variant).
We've literally eradicated a more difficult and deadly disease before. I'm not saying we need to eradicate COVID19, but its absolutely within our power.
Unlike smallpox, SARS-CoV-2 has animal reservoirs. So eradication is not a feasible goal. But widespread vaccination can minimize the long term death toll.
The relationship between Smallpox and Cowpox was well known even in the 1700s. (Though the concept of infectious diseases was not understood until the late 1800s, the people who hung around cows a lot didn't die of Smallpox as much).
Turns out that Cowpox was the same viral-family as Smallpox, and that Cowpox could be used to lessen the effect of Smallpox.
So there were absolutely animal reservoirs of the Smallpox viral family. The disease was shown to hop from different species (from humans to cows and vice versa).
The word "pandemic" ~didn't exist prior to vaccines; arguably, it's too early to say whether every pandemic or no pandemic has ended.
We didn't used to have pandemics. We had plagues and poxes. We only had pandemics once we started having the option to not have everyone die of communicable diseases regularly.
The 1918 pandemic didn't end until 1957. The virus came back as seasonal influenza until it was eventually displaced by H2N2 (as H1N1 displaced whatever influenza was around pre-1918). That H1 envelope protein came back in the 2009 pandemic and has been with us ever since.
With a high enough vaccination rate, even a disease with R0 of 20 can go away (COVID19 has an R0 of 3 to 6, maybe 9 if we include Delta variant).
We've literally eradicated a more difficult and deadly disease before. I'm not saying we need to eradicate COVID19, but its absolutely within our power.