show me where that meager "49% lower risk" was anticipated - not only it wasn't anticipated, it is even not being paid attention to right now judging by all those vaccine mandates which are completely pointless giving such a low vaccine efficacy:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/delta-variant-...
"Reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said.
Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was “mythical”.
“The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population,” he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus.
“The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus … and we don’t have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission.”
...
Data from a recent React study conducted by Imperial College London suggests that fully vaccinated people aged 18 to 64 have about a 49% lower risk of being infected compared with unvaccinated people. The findings also indicated that fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%)."
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The data and studies from Israel, Singapore, UK as well as my own DIY arithmetic on public MA data (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068532) point to the same - third to half chances for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. CDC data on Provincetown outbreak is also pretty clear, though not for everybody :)
And once infected vaccinated people are spreading the same way as unvaccinated https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
"The higher the amount of coronavirus in the nose and throat, the more likely the patient will infect others. In one Wisconsin county, after Delta became predominant, researchers analyzed viral loads on nose-and-throat swab samples obtained when patients were first diagnosed. They found similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients, with levels often high enough to allow shedding of infectious virus. "