RWE for 2nd MSB COVID-19 ARDS P3 Trial, page-222

Herd immunity DOES matter. While vaccines will be helpful in mitigating the effects for many people, natural immunity from actual infections also protects people from future exposure.

Take the Spanish flu. While the initial infection was dangerous and killed many people because of the lack of immunity, it wasn't nearly as lethal as the variant that followed a couple of years later. Those who were infected in the first round and recovered had sufficient immunity to shrug off the later more lethal variant. Those who escaped the initial infection but caught the worse one had a far higher mortality rate.

Nature is now opening a door to find a way out of this crisis as it always has in the past. Meanwhile the CCP simply wants to try and impress an audience that an authoritarian political solution can out perform natural forces and democratic institutions. So it has vaccinated it's subjects with an ineffective home grown vaccine while still failing to approve more effective international ones, purely out of political considerations. If they succeed in suppressing the Omicron outbreak they will render themselves vulnerable to future infection from a more lethal variant and have to stay closed and isolated. If they fail then they will show the system they have been touting as superior is a fallacy. Either way, they lose.