Vulerable people should be getting their boosters like clockwork, but the real world data completely changes the equation as to whether you should vaccinating under 25s (to pick an arbitrary cutoff).
Downvotes in 3, 2, 1....
Two things to consider: “wane” is not the same as “dropping to 0” — the protections against severe cases have been shown to remain substantial even if it's not 100% — and “prevent transmission” in this case was referring to people who live in the same household, which is by far the hardest situation in which to prevent spread since that's a significant amount of time sharing air without masks. A better question would be things like how much vaccinations prevent spread from shorter / masked contexts such as transit, school, work, shopping, etc. — similar to how we might not conclude that a bulletproof vest is useless because it can't handle sustained fire from a machine gun.
> don’t prevent transmission much at all
Where does this come from? I'd previously heard that these vaccines do a pretty good job of curbing transmission. Or rather, a number like 30% efficacy (of preventing transmission) is really good for vaccines.
Then, why would we expect that a vaccine against the original strain of the Covid 19 virus works as well against a new variant?
For people in charge, the most powerful tool today is the vaccine as there is no universal 100%-efficient cure yet. They will encourage everyone to vaccinate as this is basically the only thing they can do, in spite of its efficiency being much lower than expected. The alternatives are limiting various freedoms of citizens up to extreme forms like in Australia.