“It’s just another variant,” said Dianne Putnam, an unvaccinated resident of Dalton, Ga., and president of her county’s Republican Party, who spent six days in the hospital this summer after contracting Covid-19. “Next year there’ll be another one. I mean, there’s going to always be different variants.”…

In interviews across the country, unvaccinated people said they had grown inured to public-health messages from exhausted doctors and nurses and even pleas from their own families, as vaccinations have become entangled in the country’s politics. Even though mandates have been shown to significantly improve vaccination rates in places and at companies that enact them, they said they were dead-set against President Biden’s efforts and had tuned out his appeals for Americans to get vaccinated as a patriotic duty…

“Pure persuasion? I think we’ve sort of run out of options,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser, said. There were still glimmers of hope, he added. Some people fearful of Omicron would take the leap. And unvaccinated Americans, he said, were still not a one-dimensional group. Some might need to just see more safety data, he said.