They did work and do work. The virus changed mulitiple times. The flu does the same, new vaccines have to be made to match the virus.
But they didn't say the ineffectiveness was due to variants.
They said full stop, then pivoted to rare "breakthroughs", then the rare breakthroughs became the norm.
But even given that, why mandate shots for companies over 100, AFTER they knew it wasn't stopping transmission, and that folks had natural immunity, etc....