Exactly. In addition, the vaccine is vastly less life-threatening than acquiring natural immunity. In addition, the vaccine is more effective against the original variant and is very successful in that regard. The same will hold true when Pfizer/Moderna "print" updated vaccines.
Nobody reasonable is disputing this, but I find it interesting that this seems to be such a common response to the findings that natural immunity is strong and durable. It's as if some people are threatened by the fact that natural immunity is so good.
I don't think any of the researchers looking into natural immunity are doing so to create a narrative that people should prefer to be infected than get vaccinated. Obviously, that would be dumb. They're doing so because substantial numbers of people have already been infected and for a variety of health and policy reasons, we need to know what that means.
One of the good implications about the strength and durability of natural immunity is that in parts of the world where vaccines continue to be in short supply but significant percentages of people have already been infected the situation might be less dire than feared.
> In addition, the vaccine is more effective against the original variant...
More effective than what?
Given that Delta is the variant responsible for over 90% of cases in the US (and likely a similar percentage in other parts of the world that continue to have high rates of infection), efficacy against the original strain of the virus is a less and less meaningful metric.
To this point - why haven't they? In the spring/summer there was a lot of talk regarding the ability to quickly switch to a new variant recipe, yet that doesn't seem to have happened. The plan for the boosters still uses the original Wuhan strain.
Having weaker but more general immunity would potentially explain why natural immunity was better able to handle a new variant. This does not eliminate the possibility that a new booster deliberately designed to counter all current variants may be even more effective.
In particular that is true for the Delta. The Delta variant is so virulent that it currently dominates by a wide margin over all other variants and there is not necessarily going to be a more virulent variant. This means that the current problem is quite likely not to be ready for more variants, but to focus on handling the Delta variant. That in turns means that vaccines and vaccine boosters may be called for as the best possible option even though natural immunity may be helpful. Natural immunity also comes with far greater risks which is another reason to focus on vaccines and boosters.
