But what justification is there for a MANDATE if the vaccine does not stop transmission? If the only one you're potentially harming is yourself by not getting vaccinated, what's the urgency?
If it stops the most severe outcomes, then it reduces strain on the hospital systems, which does impact other people. If you break your arm and need to go to the ER to get treated, do you want the beds filled with covid patients and them telling you that you need to find another hospital? Or do you want the covid infected at home drinking gatorade and eating chicken noodle soup?
The reason why we don't have the same measures for the flu and the common cold, is because when most people catch those things, they can be treated at home with OTC meds and getting some rest.
If the vaccines can accomplish "making covid no worse than the flu", then it'll have served its originally stated purpose.
If you recall, in the initial public discourse about the vaccine, the experts were saying they would be happy with a vaccine that could drastically reduce hospitalization and death, and if they could get a prevention transmission reduction on-par with the flu shot (40-50%) they'd be happy.
Well, we have that.
Granted, it was poor public messaging combined with the fact the vaccine vastly outperformed the original expectations against the wild type that 'spoiled' people so to speak. The expectation was never that the vaccine would prevent > 90% of transmission like it did originally, that was just an added bonus. And when it fell below that, people went into 'panic mode' about it.
I've had both the virus and the vaccine...there's a good chance that most people will get the virus at some point. It's advantageous to society as a whole that if/when people get it, it's something that can be addressed at home with some tylenol and bed rest rather than having to use up an ICU bed at a hospital.