Fortunately, the CDC's Sept. 2021 updated definition makes it clear that non-sterilizing Covid vaccines should not be conflated with the transmission-stopping track record of sterilizing vaccines (e.g. MMR) mandated for school & travel.
There are intranasal (e.g. inhaler) vaccines under development, which may provide nasal/mucosal antibodies. Until those are available, recovery from natural infection will provide both nasal/mucosal and blood/serum antibodies. This path is available to both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
We may need further short tactical lockdowns, and are considering booster shots for the elderly, but the situation here is night and day compared to the US and many other countries thanks to an effective vaccination programme with broad popular support.
It's amazing to me how the political culture of the right has diverged between the US and Europe, and here in the UK particularly. For us responsible behaviour in public and prompt vaccination are conservative touchstones, not exclusively conservative of course but very much seen as not just compatible with conservatism but flowing directly from it's basic principles. What's happened to Republicanism in the US is confusing, and rather horrifying from that perspective.
Early this year we were seeing similar rates of new infections per day, but about a thousand people were dying every day. Nowadays the death rate is about a tenth of that, concentrated among the remaining unvaccinated population.
Israel seems to be having a similar experience, people are catching the virus but those that are vaccinated aren't dying as a result. They're introducing mask mandates and considering tactical lockdowns to try and protect the unvaccinated population. We may need to do the same, nevertheless the best way to protect people who can't be vaccinated is to vaccinate everyone who can be.
All you have to do is get the growth factor below 1.0 and the virus will die out as it can't infect enough people to stay alive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
> Israel was the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against COVID-19. Now it has one of the world's highest daily infection rates — an average of nearly 7,500 confirmed cases a day, double what it was two weeks ago. Nearly one in every 150 people in Israel today has the virus.
Not a great advertisement for non-sterilizing vaccines.
tbh the concept of herd immunity doesn't care about who the law says can get vaccinated
> Evidence from studies primarily done before vaccine approval for those 12 years of age and older suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
if they're vaccinated, they count towards the numerator
if they are a person, and thus have a nonzero chance of getting infected, and a nonzero chance of infecting others if infected, they count towards the denominator
that's how you determine vaccination rate
whether or not society must continue to pay an ongoing price for mitigations is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
whether or not society can move on after a one-time vaccine cost is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
the goalposts were set at "provides a societal benefit", which it does