I tried to reply to a comment criticising Covid vaccines for not being 100% effective but by the time I replied the comment was flagged and I couldn't reply.
It's a common misconception so I did want to leave my answer here... The text I was replying to was:
"Vaccines are also supposed to prevent you from getting a disease. What do you call something that does not prevent you from getting a disease. Does not prevent you from spreading it. Does not guarantee you won't die from it. And only lasts about 4 months?"
Have you ever had a flu shot? What about years when the flu shot was a mismatch for the most widely circulating strain of influenza? Scientists need to make predictions on the correct strain and some years they failed in their predictions and the flu shot didn't completely protect against the most common strain. This has been happening for years, before covid.
It's the same with covid vaccines, the current mrna covid vaccines were not an exact match for the most common circulating strain right now (omicron). So, of course, those vaccines will not fully prevent you getting the disease. It will reduce the symptoms, reduce the risk of severe illness (but it's a numbers game, less severe illness cannot mean absolutely no deaths at all) in the same way a flu shot doesn't always completely protect you.
The flu shot is an exceptionally poor-performing vaccine and the Covid vaccines are similarly bad or even worse. Especially the side effects are bad compared to other vaccines.
Just like any medical intervention, taking a vaccine is also not completely risk-free, so if I'm taking one, it better protect me from something.
Now that Omicron shots are out, it seems to be in order to dispose of the old vaccines against the original, now-extinct, strain. (It's always in order to dispose of expired medication anyway.) Non-expired doses can be given to impoverished nations who would otherwise not have access to any vaccine at all, but that's also waning in significance as those places have acquired natural immunity.
Also, neither the vaccines nor natural infection "only lasts 4 months." Antibody titers are expected to wane over time. More meaningful indicators such as the T cell response are not being tested on a large scale, so we don't have any data.
>The flu shot is an exceptionally poor-performing vaccine and the Covid vaccines are similarly bad or even worse. Especially the side effects are bad compared to other vaccines.
I have a suspicion that every vaccine ever created was poor performing ( yes, I'm an anti-vaxxer if you wish). The flu happens so frequently that most ordinary people can anecdotally compute it's (in) effectiveness. This is less true for the less frequent diseases where the vaccine can always take credit for the non-existence of the disease, And when the disease popups occasionally (clueless) people are told that it would have be far more serious had the shot not being taken. If the rare disease did show up in large numbers, people are told that it's different strain. My point being with so many variables it's difficult to credit the vaccine for its effectiveness.
But if one steps aside and looks at the financial/scientific motives for pushing a vaccine (sunken cost fallacy), the vaccine's supposed effectiveness not matching ground reality becomes clear.
*sunken cost fallacy= we have spent billions and 5 years of research, and have not effective vaccine to show, what do we do?
There's a pretty dramatic drop in the 1970s. Do you have any explanation for that if the vaccines were poor performing?
How about polio? [2]
I'm just trying to understand how you reconcile your suspicion with those facts? Are Polio and Smallpox the "less frequent diseases" you mention? They definitely were not less frequent for a long part of human history. My grandmother knew kids who died of Polio and everyone from her generation I've talked to had horror stories about this disease (also why people her generation were a lot less reluctant to vaccines.. )
Let me explain to the extent that I have explored. My memory is sketchy, but I did it several years back while cross checking the infamous anti-vaxxers, to see if they were making things up.
Treat mainstream graphs/statistics with suspicion. They hide ground realities and sometimes the numbers can be outright made up.
> There's a pretty dramatic drop in the 1970s. Do you have any explanation for that if the vaccines were poor performing?
There were villages in the world were the smallpox vaccine did not work at all. ( I vaguely recollect UK, and India). I also have some first hand account of form previous generations in a place that i lived (obviously I'm not going to give myself away) where smallpox was supposed to be rampant. It was rampant only among the poor and underfed that were living in squalor, The well fed did not have it. Part of the success of the vaccine can be attributed to the cleaning up of the filthy conditions where people with small pox lived.
>How about polio? [2]
>I'm just trying to understand how you reconcile your suspicion with those facts? Are Polio and Smallpox the "less frequent diseases" you mention?
They were very less frequent ( almost non-existent) among the well fed and healthy. If you look at contemporary literature by medical practitioners during the time Polio ( and SP) were prevalent you see see a lot of speculation as to what the reasons were - ranging form contaminated wells, bed-bugs to DDT. DDT was one of the chemicals supposed to result in polio. I think Pakistan still uses DDT and polio indeed exists there. There are also conditions which I believe I now labeled by other names which are similar to polio. The renaming of conditions in every generation is also something you will discover if you were to read the works of medical practitioners of the past.
>They definitely were not less frequent for a long part of human history. My grandmother knew kids who died of Polio and everyone from her generation I've talked to had horror stories about this disease
No one is denying that people died, it's just that I have come to believe that the causes have been covered up, and every thing has been blamed on a difficult to prove virus. My point is that the hard link between a vaccine introduction and disease eradication is not consistent, infact in some cases you will find that the vaccine administration actually introduced the disease.
>(also why people her generation were a lot less reluctant to vaccines.. )
People will actually do anything when they are scared, including prayer, sacrifices, and the modern day educated version - vaccines, without critical evaluation.
There is a larger point that I want to make, That is when you doubt the mainstream narrative, you really have to go outside of your comfort zone and look for obscure literature that is counter-narrative. That's countless hours of investigation that will not show up in a simple google search.
Living in Georgia, i have had an inordinate number of discussions with people who are unvaccinated. I will say that while that kind of talking point gets repeated a lot, deep down, most people know it's not true.
The number of people i meet who say that, but really are so ignorant as to believe it when you talk to them in private, is very low.
Instead, it's usually because it's socially acceptable to say it. The reason it became acceptable is in large part because of the loss of trust that was caused - go look at all media reports and scientists in the run up to vaccines, and when they started to be distributed.
The narrative was 100% "This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick". Then it suddenly turned out that was not true, and that narrative disappeared and got replaced with the "that won't happen but you should still take it because it helps make sure you don't die" narrative. This has happened with lots of things during covid - claims are made, data later suggests some are correct, some are not, narratives change and adapt, old claims are forgotten, and overall people trust less.
I understand this is basically "The scientific method in full view".
But that isn't always a good thing :)
We aren't built to be socially accepting of this sort of thing, as much as people seem to think that all forms of transparency are uniformly good. It may be a long time before that changes.
One of the other major factors is that covid is fairly silent as a killer - it happens mostly behind closed doors (or later on, when "surviving" people discover that lung transplants have an astonishingly low 5 year survival rate, and that lots of lung issues are relatively short-term death sentences).
That makes it easy to out-of-sight, out-of-mind it, and humans are very very good at (read newspaper about war, think war is horrible, turn page to the comics and completely place war out of your mind)
If covid made people randomly bleed from their eyeballs (IE so that it was hard to not have it be in your face), you would a lot more vaccine uptake, even if the overall death rate was the same.
>"This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick"
I honestly don't remember ever having that impression. Could you point me to some old headlines that were around at the time that gave that impression?
The unconstitutional vaccine mandate was based on the premise that you're harming others by not getting vaccinated.
Remember when Fauci was just making up herd immunity numbers based on the vaccination rate? He later admitted it was made-up and basically a way to motivate people to vaccinate. Notice how no one talks about herd immunity with respect to the vaccine anymore.
> Less so when anti-vaxxers ensure we don't reach that point
Wouldn't most anti-vaxxers have been infected by now & thus have durable immunity based on every protein of the virus vs. a single sub-unit of a protein?
For what it's worth most of my vaccinated friends have been infected multiple times, it took me 2.5 years, as I was out and about living my life in crowded public places, to get infected and it went away after 4 days of mild illness.
Now, keep in mind, like I said, I understand that a lot of this is
1. Sensationalization of what various scientists said (though there are plenty of stupid quotes that they should not have said)
2. Things that change over time
It's also the case that buried deep towards the end of most of them are the typical "there are still unanswered questions" style silliness to make the headlines/etc more defensible when they get called out on it later (IE "well we did say there was uncertainty in two words of one sentence at the end of the article!"). Of course, they also put those in a place in the article that they literally know will not be reached by ~90% of readers.
So I think it's fair to say that when it gets presented to tons of people as it has in these headlines/stories, and then a year later, the same places are just giving you a completely different narrative now based on reduction of severity rather than transmission of disease, that definitely makes people trust the narrative, the outlets, and the scientists less.
In that, i mostly blame the outlets/media, not the people or the scientists. They know exactly what they are doing. They know exactly what parts of their stories people look at, what they want, etc.
To me, the way they operate is as bad for society as facebook/etc, but much more dangerous in practice because they are much more effective at playing both sides - big tech will be regulated, but the media?.
Where we are on even considering having media have any form of responsibility or accountability?
They are very effective at shifting between arguments. How many industries can you name that have been successful simultaneously arguing things like "the first amendment means we should not have any responsibility or accountability at all on what or how we publish and what it says" and "everyone else should be forced to pay us for what we do decide to publish".
You can produce whatever you want with reckless abandon, and everyone else should have to buy it from you. Nice racket if you can swing it.
Mostly, a vaccine does not guarantee that you will not get the disease (though some do), it usually reduces the risk you develop a bad form [1]. Which is why the expression “vaccine works” without defining what we mean by work lead to unproductive debates.
We ended up with antivaxxers making claims that since the vaccine didn’t prevent infections it was a fraud, and vaxxers claiming that the vaccine would rid us of the virus, and often making public policy on that false assumption.
Some vaccines do reduce the chance that will you will get the disease or transmit it enough that if the whole population gets vaccinated the virus won’t circulate anymore but that’s not the case with covid vaccines.
Too much binary thinking. Somehow we got to the point where either it's 100% effective at preventing infection, transmission and serious illness, or "it doesn't work". I've heard people I respect as intelligent software engineers tell me that since the COVID vaccines don't 100% prevent this or that, "they don't work." As if your application "doesn't work" if it has at least one bug in it.
The problem is that with something as contagious as Omicron, if you reduce transmissions by 10 or 20% you don't really do anything, everyone will get it either way, at best you bought a few days. So you need a materiality threshold.
I’m not the commenter you were trying to respond to, but I’m not sure that’s particularly responsive. Many people treated the flu shot as a different category of vaccine well before COVID. Many people who have their kids the standard vaccine program etc. made jokes about the flu vaccine for exactly the reasons you cite.
Surely you acknowledge there’s a difference between the expectations people have about the chickenpox vaccine (basically eradicated noticeable childhood chickenpox disease by giving all kids a live viral vaccine with an attenuated strain) and the flu vaccines.
> 1 dose of single-antigen varicella vaccine is: 82% effective at preventing any form of varicella. Almost 100% effective against severe varicella.
And that's actually one of the more effective childhood vaccines. People underestimate how much we rely on herd immunity for some of the big childhood illnesses.
Varicella spreads very easily, but 82% is wildly higher than the effectiveness of any of the COVID vaccines at preventing infection. So the public seeing it as wildly different is justified, and public health authorities have themselves to blame for communicating about this incorrectly and thus causing a dramatic loss of confidence in existing childhood vaccines.
>basically eradicated noticeable childhood chickenpox disease by giving all kids a live viral vaccine with an attenuated strain
Purely anecdote. I know one kid who had the shot have chickenpox twice. ( cannot recall but there were other kids also in a similar situation) Of course chickenpox was a disease that was near completely harmless (several people and kids that I knew first hand had it) to start with.
Then the shots came along, and a new generation that never knew about chickenpox, were told that if the the person who had the shot had chicken pox it was far less worse that what it would have been. My point being that it is marketed to people who are clueless about the original chicken pox to start with. All smoke and mirrors.
The public's. That information is widely available in easy to understand formats in every language. People spreading misinformation is not the fault of scientists.
Blame the public for poor science communication? No. Its not the public’s fault for science communication being ineffective about something that involves the public. Even the CDC realizes has badly they flubbed their communications for the pandemic.
You also had Fauci and President Biden spreading the message of vaccine created immunity until the vaccine was found to be ineffective on preventing delta variant.
The popular understanding of vaccines prior to COVID was vaccines worked to prevent disease. Even the flu vaccine were generally effective at preventing you from catching the flu. Covid vaccines were extremely ineffective at preventing COVID. Almost every vaccinated person I know has had it, some folks have had it multiple times. Only when it was evident that the Covid vaccines were essentially ineffective as a preventative, you saw the communications strategy shift to “prevents severity”, but even that seems to be a pretty dubious claim in hindsight.
I recall science journalists spreading the concept of sterilizing immunity with regard to the covid vaccines even comparing them to small pox vaccine and invoking the concept of herd immunity which cannot and will not be possible with this disease. That is not a public fault.
Does my source matter or will you disagree with the point I'm making anyway? As I said, it is recollection of news clips and twitter from CDC officials/accounts, it would take some time to find and I'm not exactly willing to go through the effort if you will not first dispute the point.
Show me the source then we'll see lol. I can't imagine the CDC pushing out informational materials that claim complete protection/immunity from any of the coronaviruses.
Of course its not that, its: "We eradicated Smallpox with the vaccine, get your Covid shot so we can beat Covid!" In an infographic which makes it impossible to search for.
Even when the main flu strains are predicted perfectly, the flu vaccines are far from a miracle magic bullet. There are vaccines which are super-ultra-effective (MMR is 97% effective against infection with measles, and it would _want_ to be because measles is incredibly infectious), but they're the exception.
> the current mrna covid vaccines were not an exact match for the most common circulating strain right now (omicron). So, of course, those vaccines will not fully prevent you getting the disease
Please don't propagate "common sense" around these new vaccines. The very limited trials showed outcomes were better getting the original booster vs the new bivalent which contains a closer match to the circulating strain. Why is that? Obviously its counter to initial expectations, but we'll never know if we don't study. We'll never study if people are contented with "common sense".
This feels like a cover-up. Instead of supporting criticising, we downplay what a vaccine really is. Fact: A lot of people are disappointed in the effectiveness of a covid vaccine. Disclaimer: Not arguing the use-fullness, only the effectiveness.
For example we basically eradicated smallpox meaning that the resulting immunity will neutralize any virus when it enters the body preventing infection.
Even the smallpox vaccine had only 95% effectiveness. It turns out that 95% effectiveness, herd immunity and the fact that smallpox is a DNA virus with low mutation rate (RNA viruses like covid19 have much higher mutation rate and as such a lot more variants reducing effectiveness of any given vaccine over time) was enough to eradicate Smallpox.
But that doesn't mean that the vaccine was 100% effective, as an other poster pointed out, some vaccinated children still got infected with small but the vaccine reduced the risk drastically https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-4...
> so you're (sic) chance of survival will be much higher
But if we literally measure the survival by how infinitesimally close to 100% it is, maybe we should just identify the risk profile of who's likely to die. Spoiler: we did that.
That comment got flagged, probably because HN audience is mostly pro covid vaccine... "trust the science" or whatever.
Initially, the only thing stopping me from getting this vaccine was that people died of blood clots / heart attacks / strokes etc... and these vaccines are more like a Russian Roulette than some remedy. Especially Astrazeneca caused many problems.
And now after months seeing that these vaccines are not any effective and people are getting covid, especially after being vaccinated / boostered I ask myself, WHY should I get it? Why don't they can make a good and working vaccine - probably because they rushed it in few months. I am a developer and a good software needs time. You can still get the software few months earlier, but it will be full of bugs and could cause many problems. I don't want to have these problems in my body.
The vaccines are very effective in preventing severe illness and death. That's an enormous success, especially if you consider the speed of development.
The difficulty of developing vaccines varies a lot depending on the characteristics of the virus. For some we still can't manage to do this, others we have fully or mostly eradicated by vaccines already. There are ideas for vaccines that might help to also prevent infection with the newer COVID variants, e.g. the nose spray vaccines. But those have to be funded and developed, and that seems rather slow right now.
Yes, we know the vaccine wasn't perfect. The question isn't if it's perfect or not, though. It's if taking it has a better outcome than not taking it. This goes for all vaccines. They have side effects. But for those in common use, it's been determined the side effects (although sad for those affected) are better on average than people not taking the vaccine.
No, the question is whether individual health choices matter. I believe they do. Numbers are not necessarily the primary decision-making point for many people.
Sorry, authoritarians, but many people do not want to live their lives via what experts tell them to do. This will never change, no matter how much you wish it would.
No one has said individual health choices doesn't matter, that's a straw man. One can both believe individuals should have a choice in taking it or not, _and_ believe the vaccines is the correct choice.
The only authoritarian thing I will do is to tell you to stop with the name calling of those you disagree with..
> No one has said individual health choices doesn't matter
The president created an unconstitutional vaccine mandate that violates individual health choices (after saying he had no power or intention of doing that during his campaign), and most of his followers & supporters endorsed it.
That's not name-calling, especially when millions of Americans were threatened against their will to take an unprecedented vaccine (regardless of their risk or antibody status). It's simply ignorant to say that authoritarian impulses were not pervasive. I had a family member say we should just do what China is doing. That means welding people in their houses and rolling out total surveillance and intense police regimentation of public life. I'll never trust them again in the same way. I saw how people act in a true emergency and it's absolutely ugly.
> And now after months seeing that these vaccines are not any effective and people are getting covid, especially after being vaccinated / boostered I ask myself, WHY should I get it?
You’re misunderstanding. The vaccines are effective, just not as effective against the current variant compared to some other variants. You’ll still get protection in general and your symptoms will be reduced if you do get infected with omicron. Vaccines are not a zero-sum game kind of choice, it’s about probability and risk reduction.
All things are imperfect.
Yes, people have died, had issues, etc. We should not dismiss that (and people do), it is in fact true.
But it is unfortunately normal, and will likely not change for a very very long time, if ever
If you give anything to all ~8 billion people in the world, even basic things like "water", or "sunlight", you will see some percent of them have issues with it.
In fact, the rate of some allergies to sunlight[1] is greater than the rate of issues with covid vaccines.
So it's not really Russian Roulette at this scale any more than "going outside" is. It's simply that humans are all too different to be perfect at giving them anything, and at a scale of almost 8 billion people, everything that can happen, will happen. In that sense it is like building software than runs on 8 billion very very similar but very slightly different platforms.
The rate of issues is right now is already essentially "The best of the best". To use your analogy, these vaccines is already just about the most well tested, bug free software that can exist in this situation
As for the other parts - as others have said, vaccines exist not just to stop disease, but to reduce severity.
The chance you have of dying with covid is a lot less with a vaccine than without one.
a lot less. At the point of that chart, if you multiply it out:
120,000 unvaccinated people were dying of covid per week
13,000 vaccinated people were dying
6000 vaccinated + boosted people were dying
You can choose to be one of the 120,000, or the 6000.
I know what I chose :)
That said, one of the things that gets lost in here is that media and others did suggest at the start that vaccines would cause the end of covid by ending transmission (IE nobody would get sick anymore), despite that being mostly a hope of scientists, and not a guarantee.
That was wrong, and has caused a serious loss of trust that gets ignored, and causes people who point it out to often feel gaslit.
We will build better vaccines for sure - the same way we try to build better software. I am part of a phase 1 trial of a next generation vaccine that tackles all variants at once (and seems very successful at it).
Waiting for perfect software is a fools errand, the same way waiting for a perfect car is.
So i'd suggest not doing that.
The question is always "are you better off with something or nothing".
I'm not trying to be cheeky here, but I've actually never heard of the flu shot being represented as a vaccine before. It's always called on signage and in the common vernacular "the flu shot", precisely because everybody knows it's a crapshoot and probably only worth getting if you're especially vulnerable.
From the US if it matters, but I don't think I've ever heard the term "flu vaccine" before. Just - Flu Shot.
But official resources clearly call it a vaccine (and not just in the US either, same with e.g. NHS).
And in reverse, aren't any vaccinations called the "xxx shot"(US english)/"xxx jab"(UK english)? E.g. I'm fairly sure I've seen people from the US say they need to get their "shots" for traveling (e.g. yellow fever if you go to at-risk countries)
This latter-day line that "if it doesn't provide 100% sterilising immunity then is it a really vaccine, hmm?" is intentionally a wedge statement, the thin edge of the anti-vax divisiveness, watered down so as to not be instantly dismissed.
I don't think so since none of those vaccines we get as kids are only good for a season, and with limited effectiveness. I think that's the real reason, not marketing.
Perhaps? Languages and common vernacular evolve in surprising ways.
The use of 'shot' was originally meant to indicate that it is given via injection; however the word 'vaccine' may have become less common because rapid mutations result in new flu vaccine versions twice a year, and vaccination only gives a limited time resistance. It would make sense this would leads to a less formal vernacular.
Since orally administered flu vaccines are in clinical trials, we might get to see vernacular evolve to accommodate them soon.
All that said, "flu shot" is a common name for influenza vaccines. There is no requirement that a vaccine be highly effective or impart a long-term resistance. Rather, vaccines which are not safe and measurably effective are not desirable and thus tend to not be made available.
> probably only worth getting if you're especially vulnerable
I also grew up in the US and came away with the exact opposite impression. Every year from when I was in grade school through university there was a massive push to get everyone to have the flu shot. I didn't hear the phrase "flu vaccine" but the reasoning was always exactly the same as for the covid vaccines: herd immunity, less chance of getting the flu, less chance of dying from the flu.
Now as an adult with no health issues, I go get my flu shot every year. Why not? It's free, it takes barely any time out of my day, and I'm less likely to die.
I often find myself wondering why people in rich countries feel like this is such a compelling argument. I know everyone's financial situations are different, but if the claimed benefits of a thing are taken at face value, why should a price tag of $0 or $100 factor into your decision to take it?
Consider someone with a median software dev salary. Why would the minimal cost of the thing be considered for more than a split second? The effectiveness and safety profile seem to me like they should be all that really matters (probably distantly followed by the social/political/professional pressures).
For Americans, it might be from an assumption that if it's medical, it's life-alteringly expensive, but thats not even the case for these things. But this idea of "why wouldn't you take it, its free!" just doesn't compute for me. There are a lot of free things I have no interest in.
EDIT: Not to mention that it isn't even really free! You're still paying for it with your taxes/insurance premiums.
I make an above median software dev salary, I definitely spend time considering $100 vs $0. Also, I now live in a country where I don't pay for most healthcare, so the default is free, which means when I encounter unexpected costs in healthcare I spend a little bit of time thinking about it, even if it's only a small amount of money.
> Not to mention that it isn't even really free! You're still paying for it with your taxes/insurance premiums.
That's a ridiculous way to look at it, I pay the same amount regardless of whether I get the flu shot or not. Therefore getting it is free.
It obviously makes sense to consider the price tag when it's some mundane thing like a nice dinner or a pair of shoes or some other random discretionary widget. But if the bill of goods is "you won't get ARDS or kill grandma", who is thinking "hmm, I might get that but $100 is a little steep"?
> _I pay the same amount_ regardless of whether I get the flu shot or not. Therefore getting it is _free._
Unless that amount is 0 (which it can't be, right? The drug companies aren't doing this as charity) how does "I pay the same amount" translate to "getting it is free"?
Whether you pay at the front desk or you pay later in the form of a tax bill or insurance premium, you're still paying. In fact, you're probably paying for more than your own doses if you're earning more than the median (not that I think that's a bad thing).
>I go get my flu shot every year. Why not? It's free
A lot of these decisions people base on their anecdotal experiences with it (right or wrong), including myself. I don't get it because the people in my life who do get them sometimes get really sick for a couple of days after getting it, and it still seems to be 50/50 on whether they still end up with the flu that season. Meanwhile, having had the flu a couple times in my life I know that it sucks but it's still only a couple of days of misery which I would likely get with or without the shot.
I'm also a healthy adult though, and I imagine my calculus will change as I get older and more vulnerable.
> having had the flu a couple times in my life I know that it sucks but it's still only a couple of days of misery
Because you've been lucky. The flu can and does kill healthy young people. I cannot understand why you would value your anecdotal experiences above population studies and your own life. Anecdotally, I've had friends my age and healthier than me end up in the hospital with pneumonia after getting the flu. A classmate of mine died from H1N1 when I was in middle school. Even if I didn't have those experiences, why would I not take such a simple action with basically no risk to protect myself from a very real threat?
>Because you've been lucky. The flu can and does kill healthy young people.
That's about as rare as getting struck by lightning though. And knowing that I will likely get sick if I get the flu shot, and also knowing that I have very rarely gotten the flu, then the question becomes do I want to get sick with flu-like symptoms every other year with the shot or every 10 years without.
As I get older this will no doubt change, but for now I'm not scared of dying from the flu anymore than I am of getting bitten by a shark or struck by lightning.
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It's a common misconception so I did want to leave my answer here... The text I was replying to was: "Vaccines are also supposed to prevent you from getting a disease. What do you call something that does not prevent you from getting a disease. Does not prevent you from spreading it. Does not guarantee you won't die from it. And only lasts about 4 months?"
Have you ever had a flu shot? What about years when the flu shot was a mismatch for the most widely circulating strain of influenza? Scientists need to make predictions on the correct strain and some years they failed in their predictions and the flu shot didn't completely protect against the most common strain. This has been happening for years, before covid.
It's the same with covid vaccines, the current mrna covid vaccines were not an exact match for the most common circulating strain right now (omicron). So, of course, those vaccines will not fully prevent you getting the disease. It will reduce the symptoms, reduce the risk of severe illness (but it's a numbers game, less severe illness cannot mean absolutely no deaths at all) in the same way a flu shot doesn't always completely protect you.