If you're not hearing about this stuff you're living under a rock.
First off, -- you probably understand this but it is worth calling out explicitly -- the vaccines *do* have a very real preventative effect. The problem is that the "prevention" is far from 100%, for various reasons. We know obvious factors: how good is the early immune response triggered by the vaccine, to what extent to variants reduce that, how much does it drop over time, how large is the incoming viral dose at initial exposure. As far as I know we don't understand the relative importance of these factors, on a spectrum from "most fully vaccinated people are mostly immune but breakthrough cases happen, more frequently during a major surge" to "most people will eventually get exposed to a large enough viral dose to have a breakthrough infection".
It isn't that clear that a hypothetical attempt to vaccinate a largely immunologically naive population against polio or measles wouldn't have the same issues with breakthrough cases we're having with SARS-CoV-2. On top of that, measles *did* have outbreak levels of breakthrough cases until they added a second dose to the standard regimen after the 1989 Chicago measles outbreak. Even then breakthrough measles is still a thing -- it's just rare and almost always really mild when it happens. It may well be that SARS-CoV-2 vaccines similarly need an extra dose, or need the two doses to be further spaced than 3-4 weeks to provide robust long lasting immunity.
Still, regarding treatments: the biggest problem with respect to treatment is that by the time you know that a case is serious you're past the point where antivirals help that much -- at that point you're dealing as much with the immune system destroying the body. Dexamethazone was a big deal in improving the situation there, and came with something like a 1/3 reduction in chance of death.
On the other hand, there are a number of existing antiviral treatments that improve the situation if applied early on -- remdesivir and the various monoclonal antibodies -- but they don't help *that* much unless they come early and they all require hospitalization level treatment. If hospital systems are overwhelmed, treatments that require hospitalization of likely otherwise sub-hospitalization cases cases are not that helpful except for high risk patients.
There are two game changers here:
1. There's a fair bit of news about an oral covid treatment that Pfizer just launched phase 2/3 trials for. That has the same "needs to be early to be helpful" issues that existing antiviral treatments do, except that it would actually be viable to take them far more early -- at first positive test or even after known exposure.
2. In an environment where hospital systems are not overwhelmed with covid cases among the immunologically naive, even those more intensive early treatments would be far more helpful than they are now.