Yes they decrease transmission from 30-60% depending on the season and among those who still get sick you are 31% less likely to die.

This is something like saying do seat belts really work?

False equivalence; this is not the flu.

No, I agree, but it's very similar though in terms of how easily it mutates and because of that impossible to snuff out with vaccines. We should only vaccinate the vulnerable like we do with the flu.

The old and immunocompromised get the least direct benefit from the vaccination because their immune systems are weak and a large portion of the actual decrease in mortality among these groups isn't directly from the vaccination but from having fewer vectors running around spreading disease.

Furthermore Covid is believed to mutate substantially slower than the flu

> Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Alphainfluenzavirus are RNA viruses that cause coronavirus disease-19 and influenza, respectively. Both viruses infect the respiratory tract, show similar symptoms, and use surface proteins to infect the host. Influenza requires hemagglutinin and neuraminidase to infect, whereas SARS-CoV-2 uses protein S. Both viruses depend on a viral RNA polymerase to express their proteins, but only SARS-CoV-2 has a proofreading mechanism, which results in a low mutation rate compared to influenza.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33064680/

On the topic of mutations letting it spread through those who aren't AS vulnerable would give it billions of new patients and trillions of new chances to mutate while killing millions of people whose lives could have been saved by a vaccine that is safer than many people's weekly commute to work.