By "the politics" you're including individuals like Fauci, the head of the CDC, and so on. These are individuals that were perceived as "the science." Beyond this, a peer comment motivated me to look up the original trial results and reporting. And yeah, it was entirely about cases. Here [1] are the data from Moderna. Oddly enough, it seems to have been moved, if not removed, from their website, but fortunately nothing ever dies on the internet.

"There were 11 COVID‑19 cases in the Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine group and 185 cases in the placebo group, with a vaccine efficacy of 94.1% (95% confidence interval of 89.3% to 96.8%)."

They were claiming it outright prevented COVID, as vaccines generally do. So "the politics" and "the science" were in lockstep on this one. As were they when they seamlessly dropped this narrative and swapped over to hospitalization/death.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20210202223626/https://www.moder...