Yeah, its only supposed to reduce the adverse symptoms of covid. You can still get covid (break through cases, rare) and not feel a thing.
The larger point about being effective against severe illness and death still stands, and seems to be so robust that it's not going to change now, so the vaccine is still very much worth it.
The article also gives a much more realistic two-week incidence rate of 404 per 100,000 population, which is about 0.2% of the population per week.
After 4 months the effectiveness waned to 47-67% (depending on the variant). So now the focus on boosters.
My point is that 100% vaccination should never have led to the expectation of 0 cases of covid. But the main thing was reducing ICU numbers/severe infections.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
-Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director 2021-03-21
https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-s...
We have overloaded the very term "vaccine" in a fairly misleading manner. One one hand we have vaccines that are highly effective in the longterm and can virtually eradicate dangerous diseases. On the other hand we have flu & covid vaccines, which can help control the severity of the disease, but are incapable of preventing regular widespread outbreaks.
Childhood vaccines are from the first category. Let's enumerate: polio, smallpox, tetanus, hepatitis b, hepatitis a, rubella, hib, measles, pertussis, pneumococcal strep, rotavirus, varicella, diphtheria, mumps. Some of these had no cases for decades, for others very rare localized outbreaks make the news. From the second category, flu and covid have regular outbreaks in highly vaccinated communities and there is no hope for herd immunity.
Perhaps it's time to clear up the semantic overload and create a new term to delineate the important difference between the two classes of vaccines. For example, use "vaccines" for the first category and "immunity stimulants" for the second.
https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/vaccines/14-diseases...
A study of almost 800k US veterans showed efficacy drops from ~90% to ~50% after 6 months, depending on vaccine; all the way down to 13% for J&J.
They're still effective for preventing death, but that looks to wane too.
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021110...
Infections, as is the case here, were never rare.
As for reduction of adverse symptoms it's unknown since deaths of vaccinated vs unvaccinated within 30 days of COVID is tracked, but not how many deaths occur within 30 days of vaccination for comparison.