I don't know, but lots of people seem to claim this (without citations).

"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection"

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

Ah, I was thinking it was that paper.

This is the conclusion, pasted:

>This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.

So two things:

1) The vaccine still helps those even with acquired natural immunity. 2) The study is comparing the vaccine targeted towards the original Wuhan variant against a moving target.

So I don't see why we should discount vaccines and rely on natural immunity when we can still update the vaccines to join the fight against new strains and collect more data.

Obviously there's still great value in this study in perhaps justifying delaying doses for people who've had a previous infection in order to get more equitable distribution of vaccines.

Thanks!

That paper is really weird, just from the abstract. The conclusion "natural immunity etc" kinda comes out of nowhere.

It'll be interesting to see the quality of it when I read the whole thing.