[jjoonathan]

> given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines

Since when were "actual vaccines" anywhere near perfect? The COVID vaccines were unusually good for vaccines, not unusually bad.

Even a low-efficacy vaccine can still be high-efficacy in a population due to herd immunity (you don't need 100% protection, you just need to push R below 1.0 so that the infected subpopulation sees exponential decay rather than exponential growth), but we don't even need to consider this nuance in the case of the COVID vaccines because they surprised so strongly to the upside.