We’re not talking about the total vaccination rate; it is a matter of how diffuse or concentrated it had to be for a particular locale to minimize variant training. Obviously it brings up questions of fairness thus was avoided by politicians.
> Vaccination is going as fast as possible, and policy was implemented to minimize all mixing of people, not just Vax/unvax.
It was a lofty aspiration but wasn’t/hasn’t been good enough. We could have had different levels of strictness from the beginning when lifting lockdowns, instead of going a full open and betting on a no variant scenario, instead of now with too late of an attempt, which will anger people and won’t be likely to work well.
It makes the case that previously infected individuals do not need to be prioritised for vaccination, not that natural immunity is better than vaccine driven immunity.
Perhaps you shared the wrong paper?
"Conclusions: Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination, and vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before."
You can prioritize those who have not been infected before BECAUSE those who HAVE been infected are unlikely to see a benefit in vaccinating to begin with.
Like, I'm academically interested in this, and I know how easy it is to share the wrong paper, hence my final comment.
> Tolerating disease spread and threats to vulnerable populations when vaccines are available that are practically risk-free (or the risk being magnitudes smaller than the payoff) is ridiculous
Those are very different justifications with very different policy implications, it is best not to conflate the two.
If breakthrough variants was the major concern (and it should have been) vaccine rollout should have been fast in addition to very high percentages, and vaccinated/unvaccinated population mix should have been minimized with policy. Anything less gives the perfect arena for evolutionary algorithm to learn its way around the vaccine immunity.
Second issue is the fading immunity of current vaccines in comparison to natural immunity. Vaccines got disproportionate attention and funding at the expense of covid treatment bets, which would have helped with developing higher natural immunity levels. To what degree conflicts of interests due to EUA play in this, we don’t know. But once booster shots enter the “mandatory” territory, that will cause an additional drop in compliance. How many boosters can we really mandate, for how many years?