It's closer than I thought, but the "two doses" amount is the kicker. That's the most important number here
Not really, no.
While both doses are important, first dose is likely more impactful than 2nd. More importantly, if the talking point is "these people are crazy because they refuse vaccination" like you were saying, it does not make sense to include people who willingly started the vaccine process as "antivax morons", as you described it.
The real measure of course is ICU unit overloading and so on.
This number is useful, but it's not a good proxy for vaccines. Age of population, relative health, and other factors (including baseline capacity + organizational ability to scale it up) will influence to what extent ICUs overload. You could have half the vaccination rate and still overload ICUs less, if the capacity is different enough.
When you stratify by age, state performance looks different too.
If mandatory vaccinations are "draconian", then our positions are so far removed from each other that it's not even worth having a conversation about this.
If you don't have discussion, what do you have?
The problem is that even right this instant, vaccine mandate requirements outstrip the availability of non-emergency vaccines by a wide margin. We're seeing lawsuits even in the US military, which allegedly has baited/switched FDA approved vaccines with non-approved (including tampering with labels). I don't know if those hold water, but it remains a fact that more places are mandating vaccines than supply of non-experimental vaccines can keep up.
Noting that, you cannot cite this
Mandatory vaccinations have been a thing for a long time, for a good reason
as a legitimate refutation of challenges to the COVID mandates specifically. They are new drugs with some known and still some unknown risks. There are assertions about how dangerous they could possibly be, but the fact of the matter is that we don't know for certain. Instead we just have a pretty good idea. Same goes for COVID's short/long term risks. For many people, it is reasonable to look at the risks and conclude being better off with the risks of the vaccine + probably a milder version of the disease than the risks of the disease w/o the vaccine. Reasonable, as in they can make that choice themselves.
Remove the legal immunity wrt these vaccines and give some long-term data and THEN we can talk about how these "have been a thing for a long time".
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This actually has some overlap with the arguments surrounding "green energy". Including the reality of how "green" or not some of the renewable sources are at present levels of technology. If solar + energy storage worked as well as it does in Rimworld or something, nobody should be using anything else unless they're in the poles. But that's not how the tradeoffs go, in reality. In fact for the time being, the arguments in favor of "green energy" are weaker than experimental vaccines :/.
It's also not obvious that forcing economic damage from draconian "environmental" regulations will net long-term environmental benefit. Especially with non-compliance in extremely significant parts of the world and how this could influence innovations that make lower emissions more realistic.
Also shouldn't be ignored completely, either. Just like lockdowns were a bad idea wrt COVID, that doesn't mean all measures were a bad idea. Same for environmental stuff. If we do nothing about it, then even if the most pessimistic predictions are wrong, we can still expect to pay a heavy toll in economic damage from global warming. The best policy would be something between over and under regulation, but good luck finding solid data or getting anybody to agree with exactly where we need to be to avoid both.
