re: Data shows cases are up in least vaccinated areas

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Is your immune system stronger with having Covid prior to your vaccination, or after (or, does it even matter?)?

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Well, I can hazard a guess. it depends on what vaccine they received, as the mRNA vaccine offers a much narrower immunologic response, against the spike protein itself. Natural infection provides a broader immunologic response, by virtue of an immune response that creates antibodies to every immunologic portion of a virus, which can vary significantly, as it depends on epitopes.

Working backward from some viral and immunologic principles that seem to be consistent, this paper seems to be cited quite a bit. LINK

This paper suggests that for particular viruses, a single epitope response is better across a population, because, quoting from my virology textbook here, ‘certain individuals produced an antibody response biased toward certain epitopes.’ This is relevant here, because in a genome sequence like COVID, made up of 30,000 base pairs, you will see a mutation rate between 1000-100,000 base pairs. The possibility exists that there might be a difference between two individuals based on what epitope produced an antigen. Given that the mRNA vaccines are trying to elicit a response along the lines of pathogenicity, it would stand to reason that natural infection and the mRNA Covid vaccines can aid one another, because the mRNA vaccines will produce antibody response along sites which are highly robust, and that the virus would want to conserve, given that its pathogenicity is based on the robustness of the spike protein.

In theory, the mRNA vaccine and natural infection would help one another, and the order isn’t necessarily important, if enough people have serum antibodies against highly conserved aspects of the virus.