A vaccine protects against the strains it was designed for. Not necessarily dynamically evolving strains that appear later. Why do you think the flu shot doesn't always work? So, yes, the vaccine did its job, nothing less, nothing more.
Misconceptions like these stem from two sources. One, only 6% of scientists consider themselves Republicans. I will leave it up to you to assess why, not a good look that the smarter someone gets, the less they stick with the party. It leaves a huge leadership vacuum because the rest of Republicans aren't exposed to the scientific process (hypothesis, experiment, validation/invalidation) and the dynamic nature of knowledge / understanding (you see that in a lot of "gotcha" posts when new information comes out and idiots are like "see, you were wrong!" Scientists embrace learning, even if it disproves what they thought).
The other is human psychology. There's this phenomenon where the less someone knows about something, the more confident they are in their abilities.
Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of...
www.britannica.com
Why is why we see all these ignorant takes from people regarding the vaccine, etc.