I think Dr. Kalyan has made some very good points. We have to look at that, but I also have to look at it from a pragmatic point of view in terms of what I see in the hospital.
To Dr. Kalyan's point in terms of mandates, yes, omicron was highly contagious and, no, the vaccine didn't do much in terms of preventing the spread of COVID. If it did, it was minimal. Omicron spread very rapidly. For delta and other previous strains, there was a more robust prevention of transmission, but for omicron there wasn't, and that takes away some of the need for a vaccine mandate, except—and this is a big exception—that what we saw in the hospital were patients who were immunosuppressed, elderly—so de facto immunosuppressed—and patients who did not receive a full vaccine regime. They were the ones who were getting very severe COVID pneumonias. I saw a lot of people come in with COVID in the omicron wave, but it was predominantly the ones who were unvaccinated, immunosuppressed or the frail elderly who were getting desperately ill from it.
From a larger population point of view, I can't make those arguments—that's more the world of NACI—but from an individual recommendation, for those three groups it would have been much better for them to have been vaccinated and boosted than not.