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Read this and for the first time you’ll find yourself (slightly) jealous of people who’ve caught the virus. Alternate headline: “Donald Trump basically indestructible by COVID now.”We’ve been over this ground before, actually. Back in May studies were already beginning to show that while natural immunity is powerful and vaccine immunity is powerful, having natural immunity and then getting vaccinated creates an extremely robust, almost superhuman immune response to the virus. My layman’s understanding is that when you’re infected, your immune system gets a look at the complete virus and begins fashioning antibodies to neutralize it. That’s different from a vaccinated person, whose system gets a look only at the spike protein. Immunity to COVID continues to evolve over time in both groups, generating more complex antibodies, but they’re especially complex in people with natural immunity because they saw more of the virus than the vaccinated did. Which may explain why people with natural immunity do much better against Delta.When you take someone who has that more complex immune memory from infection and dose them with the vaccine, you generate an enormous surge of antibodies and prompt that person’s already sophisticated response to the virus to become even more sophisticated from a second look at the spike protein. Result: Not only are they extremely protected from illness, the antibodies they produce are capable of handling all known strains of the virus and unknown respiratory viruses as well.