I'm pro-vaccine and boosters in the at-risk portion of the population. The vaccine doesn't stop the spread, but it does slow infection in the certain strains it was designed for. I haven't followed much of this shit in a while, at least not as thoroughly as i did the last year or two, so maybe there is some new information out there that says otherwise. As you know, the scientific process isn't concrete, it's about doing the best with the information we have at the time, and as we gain new information we adjust and change hypotheses to reflect updated data. I don't think there should be any current mandates, and i'm not taking any boosters unless I have to for travel out of country. I'm not going to dig into the methodology of that NIH study to nitpick, as it's not terribly important to me, so i'll just skip over that. I'm sure there's a reason that the bulk of hospitalized are vaccinated at the moment, i just don't have an answer for it, and don't have the knowledge of the topic to intelligently surmise why that is. Maybe they were being hospitalized for a strain of covid that their booster didn't cover, or maybe it's simply a numbers game since the majority of the US has had at least 1 covid shot (which usually tallies them up under the "vaccinated" status on these reports), instead of having a full up-to-date series of boosters/vaccinations which would have protected them from whatever strain they caught.
idk