Here is my prophecy for today.

The coming years will see the rise of a "compliance culture" where any and all actions and every aspect of your life will be subject to intense monitoring and regulation. In fact the monitoring part, via mass surveillance, already exists. It's just that now the government has more excuses to actually utilize it.

Going anywhere further than a few miles from your home, or into certain establishments like movie theaters or the like, will require you to identify yourself and present a "health passport" to be checked against a central database. Small businesses will have rules and regulations rapidly and constantly revised out from under their feet, as they present a threat to incumbent corporations.

All this ties into the parallel society and economy. The losers in this Brave New World will of course be the conservatives, traditionalists, and/or libertarians. Bitcoin and the like will only be used for the parallel market as it will be probably be banned.

@hector the vaccines will eventually be distributed, and the only ones who won't be vaccinated will be those too foolish to get the shot. In such an environment, there's no incentive to use covid as an excuse to monitor us.

@Demosthenes you're wrong. The incentive is always power, and that doesn't depend on how many people are "vaccinated." You would be foolish to take an experimental immunological treatment that has never before been used in humans to protect against a disease with a less than 0.5% fatality rate.

But anyway the mere existence of a fraction of the populace who have not been ensnared in the medical web of control will be the pretext for biosurveillance. And there's always more viruses…

@hector yes, but exercising power requires leverage to get noncompliant people to comply. Without a good justification, they just won't comply, and a certain subset of people would actively resist.
The vaccine has been tested on thousands and administered to millions at this point, so putting the word "vaccine" in quotes is unnecessary. It is undeniably a vaccine, albeit a new one.