Also, to tack on the polio discussion - less than 1 percent of polio infections lead to any serious consequences, but I'm quite happy we worked to get rid of it. Personally, as far as the mandate, I'm a bit on the fence. Generally, I don't like mandates, but I do think vaccines are an area where the government should mandate them in certain circumstances. Is this that kind of circumstance? I think we are mostly at the end of this as a pandemic, so not sure it is worth the cost.
One area that I'd agree with Mdot here is that this vaccine doesn't appear to be capable of "eradication".
Per the things I posted about the polio vaccine, the original oral polio vaccine would provide the level of immunity that would stop you from contracting or passing on polio. Once polio was basically eradicated [although it's not 100% in all geographies of the world] countries moved to an inactivated polio vaccine that protects you but isn't as good at preventing infection/transmission. They did this for safety--the oral polio vaccine could potentially give you polio, making it risky. The inactivated polio virus cannot under any circumstances give you polio.
The reason this works is that if you're statistically unlikely to ever come across the virus in your entire life (because it's been basically eradicated in the US) then you don't need a vaccine that prevents transmission.
But that's not the case with COVID. We didn't have time to produce and test a live or attenuated virus vaccine. The risk of such vaccines is much higher than the mRNA vaccine, because the mRNA vaccine
cannot give you COVID, whereas a live or attenuated virus has a small chance of doing so.
So all we had was a vaccine that significantly reduces the chance of severe illness or death, but isn't capable of 100% preventing infection or transmission.
I don't think a vaccine mandate makes sense in this case, because a vaccine mandate won't lead to eradication.