Vaccination after infection does appear to provide excellent protection though.

We are still doing the science on all this of course.

> https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

This report on an Israeli study seems to imply that natural immunity was superior to the vaccine for protection against delta, though a combination of vaccination and infection provided the best response. This, to me is intuitive.

Note: 1, educated conjecture ahead

It seems intuitive to me that the natural immune response would provide greater protection against variants like delta, stemming from the nature of their targets. The vaccine is highly tuned for a specific target: the spike protein. Conversely, natural immunity performs multiple "training" runs in parallel, targeting a wider variety of antigens. If you'd take a ML perspective, this is somewhat analogous to an overfit model vs a more generalized model.

Note 2: Alas, you still have to get Covid to begin with to get natural immunity, so you probably don't want to go out of your way to get it if you haven't already.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

> In today’s MMWR, a study of COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus. These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections.

>Second, the study period for this analysis occurred before the predominance of the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant;

In the Israeli study, they specifically were observing efficacy against the delta variant, which is the dominant (or will be dominant everywhere eventually). This is notable, because Delta, while not fully escaped, has shown some degree of resistance to the current vaccines.

As such, what I think is the most correct interpretation, given the current information (and is in line with my intuition) is that yes, the vaccines provided greater protection against initial strains, but the relatively narrow target means that they provide a less robust response against later divergence as compared to the more robust natural immunity.

Supporting evidence, please?

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/vim.2021.0054

Or if you don't like anecdata:

In the country where I live, more people die per hour of covid than the total number who've died from a vaccine. Considering that, what the point of even trying any further comparative analysis?

I’m sorry about your cousin.