When people say "we need to vaccine 80% of people" I feel like they don't understand that more than 20% of people are categorically ineligible to be vaccinated, like, ever?

You can't vaccinate kids yet and that doesn't look likely to change. Appears to be that pregnant women are being advised against too. Add in people with unusual immunological conditions and a few other cases, and you're up to like 25% of the population.

Once you get a kid-approved vaccine this calculation changes obviously (kids alone are like 21% of the population) but that's probably a ways off still.

Moreover, it actually gets worse than that. See, about 92% of kids have the MMR vaccine.

But folks who got vaccinated pre-1968 had a vaccine that needs boosters. Few people get boosters. As a result, probably only about 80-85% of Americans have an active MMR vaccine.

And that's a vaccine which is extremely widely adopted and indeed mandatory for a lot of stuff!

Which is to say.... saying "we have to have 80% coverage" is basically just preordaining defeat.

In reality we are probably not gonna need 80% coverage. I just get irritated by the folks who act like that's the goal and who clearly haven't thought it through.