> Why is "natural infections and recovery produce a better immune response than a vaccine" so controversial? Why would that be your default assumption? Is it b

> Why is "natural infections and recovery produce a better immune response than a vaccine" so controversial? Why would that be your default assumption? Is it because ""natural infections" are natural and natural "should" be better? That is straight-up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy Have you considered the counternarrative that "vaccines are engineered to produce a strongest possible response" and you should therefore expect them to perform as designed, unlike haphazard nature. Or perhaps consider that either might be true, and discard any prior assumptions about "natural = better". > Has it been this controversial for any other disease It's "controversial" because politics this time. It's not the default assumption in this or previous diseases, because it's often not true. The last time this was raised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107854 Not to claim now that those links are the whole story, but they do represent a whole lot of prior knowledge. So it seems that there is some debate and nuance on this topic. My (simplistic) understanding is that vaccines produce a different and in some ways stronger response than the disease that they mimic, as they are literally designed to do. The COVID vaccines mostly contain Spike protein and therefor produce a very strong response ... but only to spike protein. recovery from infection produces response to that and other parts of the virus.