I see this pushed everywhere and people seem to accept it as a foregone conclusion at this point. The official line is seemingly "The virus can infect both vaccinated/unvaccinated and both groups can transmit the virus to others but there is less risk of severe disease in the vaccinated group."

I'm trying to determine how true this statement is. There is surprisingly not much data to go off of. I can't find any data at the county level in the U.S. of hospitalizations broken out by vaccination status. If anyone is aware of any please do let me know. I would think that if the goal is to vaccinate more people and this is the big selling point of the vaccines, then this data would be plastered everywhere such that it can make the case on its own. However, the best data I've found so far is from the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report survey covering New York.

This graph appears to show that for the weeks from the beginning of May to the end of July the hospitalization rate for adults under the age of 50 was roughly just barely above 0 for the vaccinated and generally somewhere between 1-2 for the unvaccinated (per 100k.) This doesn't strike me as much of a difference. Could confounders easily make up this difference? e.g. How many people in this age cohort are being told by their doctor not to take the vaccine because of their already poor medical condition? (There are likely others I'm not thinking of as well.) In any case, this data isn't very compelling, IMO. Am I misinterpreting this data? Should I be thinking of this differently? I'm open to criticism on this and would appreciate any. Not seeking validation just truth.

Another data point is from the well-kept weekly data from the U.K..

This spreadsheet appears to show effectively no difference in mortality for vaccinated/unvaccinated <50 and about a 0.4% difference in hospitalizations. Again, I have to wonder if confounders could play a role in such a small relative difference. We have to remember "unvaccinated" aren't a perfect control group and the vaccination program is not a perfect randomized controlled trial. In any case, this evidence seems more or less consistent with the CDC data and again, IMO, isn't very compelling, at least it's not brain dead obvious to me that the claim is being backed up by the data. Again, my interpretation of this information can easily be flawed and I welcome such feedback which points it out.

If anyone is aware of any similar data I'd be anxious to see it whether it supports my existing analysis or not. But please don't share the "99% of people hospitalized with covid are unvaccinated" stuff. That's almost entirely the product of earlier reporting where the observation period was December/January in the U.S. until May. During this period the vast majority of people in this age cohort weren't even able to be fully vaccinated yet and it coincided with the largest case spikes in the country.