Does this study actually conclude that vaccination is better at preventing being infected with variants? It looked to me that the study only proves that specifically the spike protein antibodies from the vaccine bind more generally than spike protein antibodies generated by a natural infection.

However during the course of a natural infection, antibodies would be generated for more targets on the virus than just the spike protein, wouldn’t it? Meanwhile the vaccine exclusively produces spike protein antibodies. This study doesn’t make any statements about how much effect those additional antibodies would have against variants.

The original paper [0] the article you quoted is based on doesn't say that the vaccine is better than natural immunity, just that it is different:

> Therefore, antibody immunity acquired by natural infection or different modes of vaccination may have a differing susceptibility to erosion by SARS-CoV-2 evolution.

They seem to be saying their tests showed that the vaccine antibodies better handled the receptor mutations they created (how much better? 100%? or 1%?), but that antibodies from a natural infection target other parts of the virus besides just the receptor (possibly offering broader protection).

> The neutralizing activity of vaccine-elicited antibodies was more targeted to the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein compared to antibodies elicited by natural infection. However, within the RBD, binding of vaccine-elicited antibodies was more broadly distributed across epitopes compared to infection-elicited antibodies.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34103407/