Intramuscular vaccination for upper respiratory aerosol viral diseases does protect your internal body from serious disease. It does that partially with antibody neutralization (via B cells) and with variants, mostly with cross reactive T cells which kill any of your infected cells.
But those B and T cells are in the body serum immune compartment. The serum igG antibodies generated by intramuscular vaccination do seep into your lower lungs a bit and provide protection. But they barely get into the upper respiratory surface tissues (mucosa) and for less than a couple months even at those low levels. And none of the T cells (or B cells making antibodies) become resident in the upper respiratory tissues where infection happens.
This means the upper respiratory mucosa immune compartment can and is still infected and spreads sars-cov-2. Even if sars-cov-2 has 70x less chance of killing you now. It means that tests for infection in the nose/throat/etc will return positive. And it means the intramuscularly vaccinated can and do spread sars-cov-2 and have to wear N95/ffp2 masks like everyone.
The intramuscular vaccination is only the FIRST STEP. The second is intranasal vaccination so that there are tissue resident B and T cells in the upper respiratory mucosa to prevent infection and spread.
It's incredibly frustrating to me (and probably others in the know) that no institutions or governments have acted on this well known historical fact (been known since the 1960s). If we go based off the time it took governments to realize everyone needs to be wearing a proper fit mask with no gaps then they should realize the value of intranasal vaccines about 2 years from now.
The greater measures we should be taking was out of scope; I was merely trying to show that the other complaint saying 'why bother with measures when they don't work' is entirely in the wrong direction -- the fact that this vastly more infectious variant is producing wave similar in scope to the original and Delta waves shows that the measures ARE working -- without them, this more infectious strain would be far worse.
The second and third worlds have far lower vaccination rates. The new omicron variant did not come from the US but from South Africa. We cannot control how well they choose to vaccinate. We can scarcely control it here.
Measures work, WHEN ACTUALLY IMPLEMENTED
When 30%+ of the population is actively working to undermine measures that require high levels of compliance to work -duh- they don't work as well.
Moreover, the new variant is literally the 2nd most contagious disease out there, with a R0 of about 12 vs about 3 for the original variant, second only to measles. Of course numbers will become similar even with some of the population vaccinated.
Just do the math.
Two shots mRNA vaccine is about 25% effective at preventing cases, 3 shots about 75%, and both are around 90% effective at preventing hospitalization, and 98% effective at preventing death.
About 65% of the US population is 2-shots vacinated and 20% 3-shot vaccinated. The majority of the cases is in the minority of the unvaxed population, and 90% of the hospitalization and deaths are.
So, you are literally complaining about the exact opposite of what you state.
What is failing is not the measures, but the lack of measures.
What is disappointing is that bad takes like this have prevented leaders from actually taking any serious steps this wave.