At the very least there has been ZERO or at most next to zero communication about why someone who actually had COVID such as positive tests or antibodies should get the vaccine.
It was around this time last year when we started to hear about re-infections. One here, one there... and we worried that immunity naturally induced by a case of covid would be short lived. By December, there still weren't many re-infections, and we were told that natural immunity would last at least 7-8 months.
Then the vaccine became available, and there were discussions about who should get it first. Some argued that those who'd recovered had natural immunity, so should be last in line. But many of those who had recovered from severe cases of covid, felt that they should go first - they had already suffered once and didn't want to take any chance on reinfection. There was also initially some concern that those with natural immunity might react differently to the vaccine (there were only a few known recoverees in the clinical trial), but after a short while it became clear that this wasn't a concern.
It was finally announced that those who recovered could get the vaccine, that is, it was communicated as somewhat optional, and that we didn't yet know if it would be medically necessary, though it was taken by many who felt they needed it for their emotional health or for travel or work.
I think the reason we didn't hear a lot about this any more is numerical. Some 35 million Americans recovered from covid - a large number, of course, but it pales in comparison with the >300 million who hadn't. So the priority has been to vax the obviously unprotected rather than the probably protected recoverees. Another concern, mentioned above, was that some of those who thought they had covid may not have had it at all.
As it became clear that there was no danger from the vaccine for recoverees, they were also told it would be good to get it. And there was one article that showed that being recovered and getting just one dose of the vaccine led to something like ten-fold higher antibodies than an uninfected person who got the two-shot vaccine.
So a couple of months ago, I think it would have been justified to say that someone who'd recovered from covid is immunologically protected as well as someone who was fully vaccinated. But the latest results from Israel are showing that
both of those groups are getting sick now. On the one hand, the numbers are relatively small, but on the other hand they're higher than we saw last summer, when it took a few months to find 20 re-infections in the whole world. Now we saw 72 re-infections in just a few months, just in Israel. The other coronaviruses, which cause a simple cold, do produce immunity that lasts about a year, so there's some concern that this might be true of SARS-cov2 as well. (This 72 re-infections looked to be about 1/6 the rate of breakthrough infections in vaxed people, but we haven't yet seen a careful analysis of that data.) It's also possible that what we're seeing in Israel is a lower immunity to the delta variant, which suggests we might have similar or even worse cases in response to new variants that emerge.
So, in short, if it's not too late for that
I think it's not irrational for people who had a well-documented case of covid to not rush to vaccinate. But there is a benefit for them to get vaccinated anyway: It increases their antibody levels, acting like a booster shot, so presumably decreases the risk of re-infection.
But the practical ramifications are not so simple. Even if the recoverees and vaxed are equally immune, that immunity is not documented equally. We know that immunity is good 8 months after infection, but many were infected 17 months ago. We don't know how their antibody levels relate to immunity. So those recoverees who want to be fully integrated in society over the next few months may want to get vaccinated anyway.
Also, yes, skyguy918's linked articles are excellent.