The scientific consensus, as summarised in this Nature article announcing the news, seems pretty clear on what was being looked at and that the trials focused on severe disease outcomes.
Nope. The Nature article was written well before the actual results and studies were released. The studies are unequivocally clear that the primary goal of the studies (at that time) were to measure prevention against symptomatic infection.
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, are you trying to say that the trial results were falsified? Because there's no other way your insistence on this makes sense. That journal article accurately reports on the findings of the Phase III trial, which did show spectacular success against the wild type.
In simple terms, had SARS-CoV-2 not mutated, and we were still dealing with the original wild type, then this pandemic would have been over months ago. They were that all-round effective.
The emergence of variants is what has caused the pandemic to continue, as many scientists warned. As I showed with the Nature article, general scientific consensus was optimistic but cautious and warned about waning immunity and variants.
You seem to think this is all some kind of gotcha, when it's really about adapting to a changing situation and an evasive virus.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577