Seems like a day late and a dollar short on this effort.
Before Omicron, two doses provided >90% protection, and held up well against Delta. Now, two doses provides only 40% protection against Omicron. Whereas three doses bumps that back up to 80%.
Given these trends it's clear that we need a plan forward, just in case, for whatever comes on the menu next year. It's likely to be an Omicron descendant, since Omicron is dominating the gene pool. It's a reasonable assumption that an Omicron derived vaccine would have provided >90% protection against Omicron. And so, reasonably, being Omicron-boosted in the future should provide something like 80% protection against whatever the next dominate strain will be, whereas the existing boosters might not fare as well.
That's the hope anyway.
Thankfully it's so much more virulent that this is going to happen whether we like it or not. Makes me think of the old chicken pox parties when I was a kid.
The virus is carried by animals and it's not going away. So we had better start figuring out how to more reasonably live with it, stop with the asinine one size fits all solutions; many of them (like cloth masks) that are actually anti-science based and stop destroying so many people's lives - especially children - I can't imagine being a child in todays idiotic overreactive and politically energized environments, especially since children had the least to fear even from the original, pretty nasty virus. Yes, there are even kids that are more at risk - but you don't screw everyone - you protect the vulnerable. Common sense seems to be utterly out the window as everyone is running around panicking; it's beyond nuts.
A self inflicted wound is hardly a reason for continued panic.
Now that the brain dead vaccine mandates are being shot down staffing should also start to resolve itself. Again, the VAST majority of issues with COVID are self inflicted - driven by politics and severely misguided social pressure.
The reality is that two doses of the existing mRNA vaccines still provide very good protection against severe disease for the vast majority of patients.
[1] https://deadline.com/2022/01/omicron-offshoot-ba2-in-us-1234...