Of course they work against current - and likely future - variants. That's not at all the point.
So here's the sad and ugly truth, swannie. The CDC, Perma-DC and Big Pharma did everything possible to lose the trust of the general public, a large majority of which was NOT vaccine-averse in the early days of 2020. But the aforementioned threesome - plus WHO on the world stage - spotted an opportunity to advance their respective agendas (the first two to regain power in the US; Big Pharma sought profit; WHO sought to grab worldwide power and advance the globalist agenda), and they promoted that agenda by driving a widespread campaign of fear to terrify a generally compliant public to alter normal life behaviors.
We knew pretty early on in the game that the folks who were truly threatened were the elderly and those with comorbidities. If the effort was to be truly "on the level", there should have been no lockdowns, and every effort should have been expended to protect the most vulnerable among us. That was what was done in the late '60's (Hong Kong Flu) and the late '50's (Asian Flu), which were similar situations. My tip-off that all was not quite right with the world this time around - as someone who lived through the HKF in grade school, with lots of older living relatives, who'd experienced what I missed in 1957-1959 - was that the mere discussion of natural immunity was quickly dismissed and virtually verboten. The mask crap - for a large majority of the public - was nothing more than performance art, and something I never gave any serious thought to using. For sure we weren't using them in classrooms in the late '60's, and that's at a time when class sizes were still much bigger than now.
Forgotten Pandemic Offers Contrast to Today’s Coronavirus Lockdowns - WSJ
You'll probably find this amusing, but I did actually get the first two shots in early 2021. I've not gotten any since, and have no plans to get further vaccines. All in all, I was one of those folks who was not really vaccine-averse at the start of the fun & games, but became increasingly skeptical as time and events played out. Now, I feel foolish to have gotten the two original jabs. But I can't un-ring that bell.
As Johns Hopkins' Marty Makary has said in retrospect (after many early warnings prior to this) ... the greatest perpetrator of misinformation through this entire pandemic was the US Government (CDC and Perma-DC). And they fooled DJT too, and it cost him his job ... which I think was the goal anyway ... and that's the bottom line.
Long and short, you want to get vaccinated, go for it, it's your choice. Mask up? Whatever floats your boat. Not me ...