The real issue that America is facing with the pandemic right now isn’t breakthrough infections—it’s infections in unvaccinated people. That’s what’s straining hospitals from Kentucky to Texas, and what caused the entire state of Alabama to run out of ICU beds this week. And boosters are definitely not the best strategy to deal with that. As Eleanor J. Murray and Ruby Barnard-Mayers pointed out in Slate, the mathematics of boosters just don’t add up. In their line of thinking, fully vaccinating 30 million partially unvaccinated people would offer the same benefits to community transmission as boosting 180 million vaccinated people (which is an extremely tall order, logistically). In other words, you’d need to reach six times as many Americans with boosters to have the same effect on transmission of the virus as just getting regular vaccination up. On a global scale, giving additional shots to already vaccinated Americans is profoundly questionable: Vaccination rates in wealthier countries are 100s or 1,000s of times higher than vaccination rates in less wealthy countries. It’s also strategically dumb. Viruses don’t pay attention to political borders, and the more the virus circulates worldwide, the more it will mutate, and the more likely everyone will encounter a variant that is deadlier, is more contagious, or—worst of all—renders the vaccines useless.