Aaron E. Carroll, the chief health officer for Indiana University, echoes a lot of my thoughts about mandates in a guest column for The New York Times.

Many may read the C.D.C.’s continued focus on masking and distancing as an acknowledgment that the vaccines don’t work well enough. Leaning heavily on masking and distancing is what we did when we didn’t have vaccinations. Today, such recommendations are less likely to succeed because they are more likely to be followed by those already primed to listen — the vaccinated — and to be fought and ignored by those who aren’t.

Hospitalizations and deaths are rising in some areas not because someone didn’t wear a mask at the ballgame. They’re occurring because too many people are not immunized.

This is why I’ve advocated vaccine mandates. I don’t understand how we can mandate wearing masks but not getting vaccinations.

These morons who won’t get vaccinated are not killing those of us who are vaccinated… they are killing others like themselves–too stupid to save themselves. We are right on the verge of massive celebrations and now we can’t quite get over the hump because of the unvaccinated.

For some strange reason that makes no sense, they don’t get that for them the pandemic has not changed. In all the places with low numbers of vaccinated people, many of them are catching COVID, getting dangerously sick, being put on ventilators, and dying.

I would beseech the Biden Administration to issue a vaccination mandate, except I know they won’t.