That said, I don't think the null hypothesis is suddenly "vaccines do nothing" for some reason. It's clear enough it spreads more easily but that doesn't suddenly invalidate all prior assumptions about the vaccines' effectiveness against severe outcomes.

Edit: I'm very happy to be proven wrong about this but I feel like people should direct some of these replies more to the person I was replying to? I'm not the one who thinks vaccines do nothing here. :P

From the very beginning, the South African medical authorities were screaming that this variant was producing far fewer hospitalizations OVERALL (despite higher case numbers) than the delta/alpha did.

But because they are a third world country, and the news media in the West is biased towards bad news, they chose to treat this positive data as suspect. It the SA scientists had talked about how horrible it was, they would have taken it as gospel.

Those of us who were looking at the data knew otherwise.

I was amused at the sudden acknowledgement of natural immunity from previous infection in the very publications that have constantly claimed it doesn't exist, the minute it supported their need to keep fear mongering. Same with the younger population point, considering these very organizations have gone out of their way to obfuscate the vast risk stratification by age for most of the pandemic. The terrified 20-somethings wearing respirators in TikTok videos are a result of this.

Can you cite some of these alleged claims?

No it's not. Late November was too early. In mid-December we could start drawing conclusions. At this point things are becoming quite clear - we see similar trends everywhere, not just South Africa.

"The data suggests that three doses of vaccine provided an estimated 68% drop in the risk of being hospitalized with Omicron compared with people who were unvaccinated."