Yeah I don’t think the goals have been clear, even if they have been changing over time. I think the clearest goal now should be a 90% vaccination rate to turn Covid into the common cold, and then going back to life as normal, but as long as huge swathes of the population refuse to get vaccinated this goal is unattainable.
Edit: I believe Biden actually set a 70% vax goal for July 2021, and we missed it. No way we can hit 90%. I think possibly for anti-vaxers their goal is simply to not be told what to do and if they end up in an overwhelmed hospital so be it.
So I suggest you reassess whether meeting that goal in your location would result in things going back to normal for you.
The other problem is that just hitting the % isn’t good enough. You need to keep up to date if boosters are required. So definitely not easy.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1063830104/portugal-covid-vac...
https://m.dw.com/en/covid-19-special-vaccination-champion-po...
1. It is a "wimpy" thing to admit to. People are reluctant to think things about themselves which, if admitted aloud, could earn social ridicule.
2. One fear can prompt another and lead to an anxiety spiral which is too overwhelming for someone to even put into words.
Conjecture: The best way to measure it would be to introduce a nasal spray and see what sort of uptick it earns.
The urge to resist force is a vital element of US culture as a check on runaway governments. You see it in many movements, on both sides for or against. Women don't want to be forced to carry a baby. LGBT community doesn't want to be forced to hide. Christians don't want to be forced to stop praying in school. Non-Christians don't want to be forced to listen to prayers in school.
Everyone should be persuaded to get vaccinated for things like flu and COVID. Very few people should be forced to do so just to keep their jobs.
No one is strapping people down and injecting them with a vaccine, it’s not a forced medical procedure. However the involvement in certain activities by the unvaccinated is limited and this is similar to many other public health orders such as not being able to smoke inside a restaurant.
There are also other ways to limit the spread of viruses apart from vaccination, like testing, distancing, masks, ventilation, etc. There should be a gradient of choice, maybe with triage nurses at the "almost definitely need to vaccinate" end, and payroll processors at the "almost definitely would be okay with regular testing and/or other standard measures" end.
As a libertarian that is actually concerned with freedom, the main thing the Trumpertantrum has accomplished is discrediting the concept. Back when it was a small subset of antivax nutters, causing at most an occasional localized outbreak, I had sympathy for people's right to make their own bad decisions. Now the political machine took up the banner and created a force majeure situation, so I'm just done.
My personal view (please don't be offended, libertarians -- it's my right to believe this!) is that individuality itself is a bit of a fiction, and this makes libertarianism essentially based on falsehood and break down. We're interconnected.
The best argument for individuality in politics and government, in my view, is that it gives "the average person" a fair shot, giving us good outcomes at the societal level even if many individuals do not get what they want.
There is also international travel as a point - the vaccine isn’t available at will everywhere, so there’s some being a good neighbor in slowly the general spread of the vaccine as well.
1 - The obvious one, everybody (or close enough to everybody) gets partial immunity either through vaccination or through actually catching it. Variants are making this a moving target, unfortunately.
2 - Somebody comes up with and mass manufactures a good-enough therapeutic that can keep sick people out of the hospitals. To this end I’m very hopeful for the new Pfizer drug.
2. I would really like to see a proper, large RCT of ivermectin, HCQ+zinc, and the new Pfizer therapeutic. The latter costs $700 per course, apparently, and many countries won’t be able to afford it. And, exclude hospitalized patients, we’re trying to find out how to keep people out of the hospital!
I hadn't thought about this explicitly but I'd also say this is most of the problem. Working in academia, some facet of our policies changes on a daily basis in knee-jerk reactions. Worse yet, my area of research is infectious disease and I imagine this must be how climate scientists feel when policy decisions just get drawn out with no goal.
Any less than this, and you'll lock down again.