It does appear that, overall, these CV19 vaccines protect against severe illness and hospitalization. However, I keep hearing that is the goal of vaccines, in general, which is completely untrue.
Vaccines are designed to prevent infection and transmission. I don't give kids their baby shots so they don't get as bad of a case of meningitis, measles, or whooping cough, and I certainly don't warn parents that they can still catch and transmit these pathogens to other frail family members. The goalposts have definitely moved.
Regardless, the vast majority of people who became infected with CV even before vaccines were available had mild symptoms, or didn't even know they had it (as demonstrated by seroprevalence studies). For most of those cases, it did not attack their entire households (e.g. nobody else in my house was infected when I had it, and all have tested negative for antibodies). So, assuming you are in relatively good health, the most likely scenario is that the vaccine did nothing at all for you.
