I agree with all that you said, but I'm asking a specific question. You gave an answer to that, but I'd like to know what the basis is for it. I'm asking if the vaccines are indeed protective against severe disease, even temporarily so. If so, then people have a "prisoners dilemma" motivation to get vaccinated, even though that's not in everyone's interest in the long run.

But the larger point is that I don't understand how this assertion that vaccines protect against severe disease squares with data from Israel and UK which show hospitalizations and deaths distributed between vaccinated and non-vaccinated cohorts pretty close to their relative proportions in the population. This seems contrary to the idea that the vaccines provide protection against severe disease. Maybe there are confounding factors (e.g. more vulnerable people in the vaccinated cohort), but it seems unlikely this would result in equivalent ratios as we see.