Life may soon return to normal after two years of pandemic disruption, Pfizer Inc.’s chief executive officer said in an interview with Le Figaro. 

“We will soon be able to resume a normal life,” Albert Bourla told the French paper. “We are well positioned to get there in the spring thanks to all the tools at our disposal: tests, very effective vaccines and the first treatments that can be taken at home.” 

Pfizer manufactures two of those three tools. Besides making the top-selling vaccine in collaboration with Germany’s BioNTech SE, the U.S. drugmaker is introducing an antiviral pill called Paxlovid that has been shown to sharply reduce hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19 in clinical trials. 

Bourla echoed other executives and scientists who point to the omicron variant’s lower virulence and its growing dominance as signs that the pandemic could soon move into an endemic phase in which countries learn to live with the virus, much as they do with the flu.  

The Pfizer CEO cautioned that doesn’t mean the new coronavirus will disappear. “We’ve had so many surprises since the start of the pandemic,” he said. “We will probably have to live for years with a virus that’s very difficult to eradicate.”