To counter your first point about school vaccination, I live in the US and the state I live in has very few exemptions which also apply to the COVID-19 vaccine. There are religious and medical exemptions, and the religious exemptions are hard to get and basically are not available for 99.9% of people.

So yeah sure, if you have a specific medical problem, or very very limited religious reason, you can be exempted from vaccination, which is the same for the COVID vaccine.

Literally nothing has changed, the COVID vaccine is now just part of the list of required vaccines (and as of right now COVID vaccination is actually not required at most universities as they are waiting for final FDA approval which will likely be here sometime in late August).

> We clearly don't, though. As a citizen you can be entirely unvaccinated and live a completely normal life.

This is only because the majority of the populace is vaccinated against polio, measles. If the majority of the population was also unvaccinated, these viruses would make life not fun. Most of us live a very sheltered life and have never directly experienced living with measles or polio.

> We clearly don't, though. As a citizen you can be entirely unvaccinated and live a completely normal life.

You seem to be arguing technicalities without addressing my point. We have lots and lots of vaccine regulation that ensures that virtually all citizens are immune to diseases like measles, hep, diphtheria, etc... No, it's not absolute, and I don't believe I claimed it was. All policy requires careful tuning.

So let's include covid in the same regime. You agree with that part, right?

Many states don’t have non-medical exemptions for vaccine requirements.

1.) The "success story" they're speaking about is the broader vaccination requirements that have been around for far longer than COVID.

2.) You mean the surge in cases that are seeing vaccinated people faring statistically far better than the un-vaccinated? I don't think that it was ever a secret that the vaccine wasn't going to be bulletproof or capable of complete success against all variants, especially variants that didn't exist at the time of development.

I have not heard of a surge in cases among the unvaccinated, actually. Do you have a cite? All data I've seen points to a 90%+ effectiveness of Pfizer vs. Delta for infection, and it looks like more than 99% vs. death. It's MUCH MUCH MUCH safer to face potential infection with the vaccine than without.

If you look at the numbers, you're significantly less likely to be infected if you've been vaccinated, and hospitalization rates are 95% lower. The fact that we're seeing a good number of people infected after vaccination is classic Bayes theorem.

If we could get 70% of the population vaccinated we could be done with this and move on with our lives.