That's probably essentially what you'd expect with omicron, which is more effective at immune escape but appears less effective at causing serious illness (at least in vaccinated and previously infected people).

Short of a vaccine that prevents infection isn’t this the best case scenario?

If it provides immunity to the other more deadly variants and competes with them, then yes, but I haven’t seen that data yet. Otherwise, it’s just a supplemental virus.

you are protected from infection only if you have a huge number of antibodies since they can immediately overpower the virus when it gets in. when the antibodies are few and the virus comes in you have to wait for the trained t-cells to produce enough of them to again overpower the virus, so you get sick for a short time and then get better. of course the quality of a vaccine determines how quickly and effectively the dormant t-cells are able to produce antibodies, so a very very very good vaccine can even protect from infection years after inoculation, and that's why the CDC has recently asked for more research in order to produce these kind of vaccines for the long term

I wouldn't even call it "very very very good vaccine". It's just a different problem each vaccine has to solve. Some problems are inherently harder: flu, coronavirus, hiv

Interesting point I heard about why we don’t (yet) have a vaccine for HIV where we do for COVID - the human body can fight COVID. Ie we mount an immune response and some people survive and recover on their own. This is largely not true with HIV - the human body hasalmost no ability to mount its own response.

Making a vaccine is more straightforward (ie we expect to be able to) when we know there is a response by our own immune systems - hence we expected to be able to make a COVID vaccine (although the time scale is still an amazing accomplishment - thanks 20+ years of mRNA research!). And we are still working on a vaccine for HIV.

I know, but with the technology we are able to employ nowadays I think it's reasonable to push for vaccines that protect people for 20 years like the one for hepatitis. Hell, now we can even think about curing cancer with mRNA, I think a strong flu/corona virus might be within our limits

Published effectiveness against Omicron infection is under 10%. This data is simply wrong.

Maybe the data you are citing is "simply wrong". Or maybe different studies at different locations and times with different methodologies have different outcomes. Science is messy.

Source?