My point is that none of the analysis being done now controls for anything and there are a ton of different reporting systems which are being compared and people are pointing at one country or another as "having done the right thing". We simply don't have the epistemic certaintly to declare that specific techniques worked or didn't. That sort of certainty comes only after decades of people working the data over and over to identify and correct for a lot of stuff missed in the heat of the pandemic.
Like, let's say that natural immunity acquired from exposure to baseline SARS-CoV-2 meant that 99% of your population wouldn't die when other variants came through.
Would the deaths from the baseline virus be worth the protection conveyed against the other variants?
What _is_ the effectiveness of natural immunity from baseline Covid against Delta or Omicron? There must be some research, surely.
A few studies to google:
CDC's January study, although that wasn't peer reviewed since it's published in MWMR, and those aren't peer reviewed.
Israel's large N study on natural immunity compared to not-previously infected, vaccinated population
Qatar's study with a sample size of 80,000 (If i recall the sample correctly)
Natural immunity conferred greater protection than vaccination alone for Delta. That's clear in these papers. Probably was not the case for previous variants, because the vaccines were generated from the earlier strain. I find it odd that there wasn't a concerted effort to "update" the vaccines with the newer genetic material for the more recent strains. Perhaps it wasn't sensible due to continued mutations inevitable with the virus.
Incidentally, any evidence that "natural immunity protection" is so much better than 3 doses of Pfizer that it would have been worth the excess deaths?