it's more about demanding better vaccine products/treatments that have more of a sterilizing effect (as is the case with many other vaccines) to where you're actually curbing transmission in a very significant way with the deployment of the vaccines. These aren't those kinds of vaccines.

The protective benefit is clear for keeping people out of the hospital and preventing death, but not clear at all in terms of how efficacious it is at stopping spread (particularly as we get further and further away from the ancestral strain of which these vaccines were calibrated for). There have been significant studies demonstrating that there's no discernable difference at this point (in August 2022) between how likely one is to get infected based on vaccination status. These Omicron subvariants don't care if you've had prior infection or if you're vaccinated - they're infecting everyone - but thankfully are far less lethal than prior strains (particularly Delta).

Now the landscape may change when these bivalent vaccines are introduced later this year. If they prove to actually be what these original vaccines were purported to be (effective at halting spread) - then perhaps there's more of an impetus to mandate vaccination.


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