And once again California leads the nation.

California will soon require its health care workers to get the COVID-19 booster shot, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday evening on social media.

Newsom said the new mandate was in response to the climbing COVID-19 omicron cases the state is seeing.

From there on the mandate will likely hit a variety of other employees before spreading out to the general population. 

None of this is surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. The significance here is the shift to deeming vaccinated people unvaccinated if they aren’t getting regular booster shots. Shot 3 is just now beginning to be mandated, but it won’t be long before shot 4 will too. And the only way to manage all of this will be a much more intensive vaccine passport that tracks vaccination in more detail.

The good news is that the CDC and public health officials are about as capable of doing that as they are of playing the violin with their teeth.

CDC data show 240 million people with at least one shot, or about 72.5% of the population. But the agency says only 203 million are fully vaccinated, or 61.3%, an 11-percentage-point difference that is far larger than in other developed countries.

Instead, they say, the government has regularly and incorrectly counted booster shots and second doses as first doses, a dynamic the CDC acknowledged in a statement. 

If there’s one thing the CDC knows, it’s incompetence.