However, it's worth emphasizing that none of that invalidates the parent commenter's claim that vaccination provides significant additional protection against reinfection for people who've already had COVID, as the study linked in the press release finds.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/28/world/covid-delta-va...

As to which is better, there are studies showing higher protection from vaccination alone than prior infection, and other showing the opposite. It’s complicated in part because the pandemic has been around for significant periods so the timing of infection vs vaccination matters. Further, infection doesn’t provide a uniform level of protection and of course the details get deep. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31235-6?_re...

And of course from a public health standpoint a positive Covid test isn’t guaranteed to represent an actual infection.

So you admit to listing one small study that states A while knowingly ignoring the other studies that argue the opposite? The NIH-funded study and Israel’s data are relevant counterpoints in this discussion.

I granted severe infections do result in a strong immune response, but simply having a positive test result isn’t the sign of long term immunity people assume. That said, surviving COVID also implies a healthy immune system which is a rather morbid example of survivorship bias.

You were overly dismissive in your first mention of this. Do you have data behind the tests being false positive? Multiple positive tests + symptoms are surely sufficient

In a study of 14 of the approved tests, one of the tests gave false positives more than 15% of the time, and three others gave false positives more than 10% of the time. https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/article/which-COVID-19-te...