They were able to assess the efficacy by looking for illness, not death. It takes some verrrry "special" framing to twist this into anything but an enormous success:

> BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6).

Yet the deaths clearly mattered when multiplied up to population scale, because COVID was able to fill up the hospitals.