The vaccinated have for too long carried the burden of the pandemic. In theory, unvaccinated people should be taking greater precautions. A recent poll conducted for the Associated Press found that vaccinated adults have been more likely than unvaccinated ones to wear masks in public settings, refrain from unnecessary travel, and avoid large group settings.

Public-health officials can keep trying to figure out ways to persuade the unvaccinated to get shots, and maybe at this late point they can still discover some new message that succeeds where all others have failed. If so, that would be fantastic. But begging is not a strategy. It is not a coincidence that many of the entities pushing hardest for mandatory vaccination are in industries—higher education, travel, entertainment—that have been badly disrupted by unpredictable waves of infection and are existentially threatened by a pandemic that goes on without end.

People in the crisis-management field have made peace with blanket one-size-fits-all policies that some individuals don’t like. When a ship is going down, passengers aren’t given the luxury of quibbling with the color or design of the life vest, and they can’t dither forever about whether to put one on or not. Emergencies invariably force people to make some choices that they might not consider ideal, but asking everyone to get vaccinated against a potentially lethal virus is not a big imposition. Ironically, by talking as if everyone, given enough time, will eventually choose the shot, public-health agencies may have understated the urgency of the matter and invited the vaccine-hesitant to dwell on the decision indefinitely.