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.