It's pretty obvious that e.g. if a 50% vaccination rate leaves the ICU at 10x capacity during an unmitigated outbreak, a 90% vaccination rate would be preferable even if it doesn't prevent the need for quarantine measures. This means that contact-reducing measures don't have to be as severe while the outbreak is happening.
What the vaccines are not doing: make it 2019 again.
Hitting mid-80% is actually pretty impressive.
Don't we want some sort of control group to remain for these vaccines that don't formally conclude their trials for a couple of years yet? Or is everyone just 100% convinced that nothing could possibly go wrong at this point? That would be proper scientific diligence.
What would be an example of something going wrong? Are you thinking that a sub-optimal outcome might occur ("the pandemic lasted 4 months longer than it had to") or that 80% of the people vaccinated drop dead in 2025?
The first case would be an unfortunate case of the best attempt of a decision made on uncertain data turning out to be incorrect in retrospect.
In the latter case, civilization is still protected as many people chose not to get vaccinated.
I guess hopefully we don't find out, because the only way it'll ever be clearly distinguished is if it goes very badly across the board. Anything less can quite simply be explained away. Isn't it nice for Pfizer/Moderna to be able to run the long-term study with immunity in a manner that is very hard to understand clinical outcomes (except the huge side-effect profile readily dismissed as 'acceptable' because some deaths are more important than others).
These decisions were mired in a whole lot of suspicious and unnecessary controversy. Rare and specific blood clots on the order of 1 per 20,000 vaccinations turned the ethical consideration of the vaccines from "obviously good" to "obviously bad" overnight, and they were removed from the program immediately. A single-digit number of unnecessary deaths were caused, but the buck stopped there.
I'm not as encouraged by the international response to this research and operative decision. It could be argued at the time that the Scandinavian decisions were made in the light of populations that had sufficiently low mortality from covid that the ethical consideration was different than in Europe at large.
But to my eyes, the European decision to keep using the AZ and J&J vaccines had an air of "let's not look too closely, or maybe we'll see something bad". Norwegian case studies indicated that the rare blood clots were pretty frickin' hard to distinguish from conditions caused by common lifestyle diseases. Two cases were specifically diagnosed only because they happened in doctors who ran themselves through a battery of expensive tests few normal patients would have qualified for. My qualified guess: There are rare but deadly and persistent side effects with these vaccines, that won't be discovered in healthcare environments that aren't finely tuned.
I suppose my point is that if there (God forbid) happen to exist bad but rare and non-obvious side effects of the new RNA vaccines, the truth can be uncovered. I'm not sure that a deliberate control group would be any good regardless; the AZ/J&J side effects were rare enough not to be seen in the control group. But they were still bad enough to disqualify the vaccines.
The whole thing is a super interesting subject, and it's obviously so political and subject to propaganda that you'd need a very critical eye to navigate it. Unless again, heaven forbid, the effect is so bad that it's obvious. Different health authorities do have different degrees of honesty and principled handling of these questions. There are control groups available; the large population of people who decide skip vaccination.