yes, too much of the wrong kind of attention and focus. biden had to do something splashy considering his approval ratings have been hovering in the low 40's for a while, and covid continues to garner the broad mediopolitical attention he needs in that regard. if our collective attention had been on vehicle injuries/deaths, he would have made arbitrary pronouncements in that arena instead.
these current pronouncements require some significant portion (perhaps 40+%) of 100 million people to give in to political aims or face unemployment and potentially destitution, to slow down a virus that is going to burn through the whole population eventually (and do so again and again). presumably by now everyone who's risk-averse or at elevated risk has gotten vaccinated. so now that those folks are vaccinated, why force others to do so, other than for political reasons (and for no other seasonal maladies killing tens to hundreds of thousands)? it won't stop spread, mutation, illness, or even death, but rather will only prolong the pandemic while shoveling federal dollars at pharma, making it a purely political gambit.
on top of the vaccination levels we have now, we can get the same epidemiological slowdown without the socioeconomic costs via some modest distancing indoors and mask wearing by public-facing workers (like cashiers) and in social settings (like at home, not generally out in public where it does practically nothing), but that doesn't have nearly the same political punch.
