This Is Disturbing

 9/30/21 European Journal of Epidemiology:

At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.

Did vaccinating increase opportunities for mutation?

This explanation of why viruses mutate explains it well.  If you get one variant, replication errors can produce a different strain.  The vaccine against one strain is of some value against genetically similar variants both for infection and severity of illness but the rate of total infections is not likely to drop.

Still, get vaccinated.   You might still get delta variant but less likely to end up in the ICU.  The sooner this virus runs out of receptive hosts in which to mutate, the better.