“Falling ill” means your body had a strong, visible immune response to the vaccine. The whole point of the vaccine is to trigger your body into an immune response which creates antibodies against the vaccine, thereby giving you protection against the real thing.
> communities with almost 100% seeing no improvement
You’re just wrong about this. In cities like Seattle and Portland, life is pretty much “back to normal.” As a result, people are interacting with each other and “spreading germs” around like they used to be. Without a vaccine, this kind of behavior would have caused a huge spike in severe cases. And while changed behavior has caused an uptick in cases, the number of severe cases has not. Unvaccinated people in King county near Seattle, for example, are 38x more likely to be hospitalized with covid.
The better explanation to your comment is that an imperfect world is hard to predict and that there are reasonable explanations to most things, rather than some sort of superstitious reference to it being a “charade.”