I don't remember what my high school biology class covered, but I was interested in becoming a virologist in middle school. Memory B and T cells aren't esoteric knowledge. If you spent even an hour or two on the internet reading about how the immune system responds to viral infection, you'd almost certainly cover them.
It's curious to me that so much of the focus on COVID vaccines focuses on the antibodies produced immediately after infection and vaccination and so little on the longer-lasting immune responses (memory T and B cells).
> Those who had recovered from COVID-19 months before receiving their jabs harboured antibodies capable of defanging the mutant spike, which displays far more resistance to immune attack than any known naturally occurring variant. These peoples' antibodies even blocked other types of coronaviruses. “It’s very likely they will be effective against any future variant that SARS-CoV-2 throws against them,” says Hatziioannou.
> As the world watches out for new coronavirus variants, the basis of such ‘super-immunity’ has become one of the pandemic’s great mysteries. Researchers hope that, by mapping the differences between the immune protection that comes from infection compared with that from vaccination, they can chart a safer path to this higher level of protection.
> “It has implications on boosters and how our immune responses are primed for the next variant that emerges,” says Mehul Suthar, a virologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “We’re flying by the seat of our pants trying to figure this stuff out.”
I'm guessing (hoping?) the researchers are not as confused as the quotes make them out to be.
It is perfectly logical that the immune system would likely mount a broader response to natural infection. When you are vaccinated, you're being exposed to a (key) fragment of the spike protein. When you are infected with the virus, you're being exposed to a lot more. The full spike protein. The S2 subunit. The nucleocapsid protein. This gives the immune system a lot more to learn from and target.
Tangentially, it's also worth considering that our current vaccines are all delivered intramuscularly. It's a shame there isn't more investment in vaccines that could be delivered mucosally.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8358136/
> ...systemic vaccination alone does not induce the whole variety of compartmentalized local immune responses observed after mucosal vaccination with the same antigen. As a respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 may require higher levels of mucosal immunity to truly slow or block transmission [2]. Indeed, the most direct pathway to sterilizing and population immunity may be especially boosted through mucosal vaccine delivery to promote anti-SARS-CoV-2 S-IgA and TRM cells at the nasopharyngeal site of virus entry and replication. Experimentally, a single intranasal dose of adenovirus-vectored vaccine protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection in the upper and lower respiratory tract in rhesus macaques [13]. Moreover, mucosal vaccines for establishing TRM cells could be particularly beneficial for pathogens that undergo rapid mutation, like SARS-CoV-2, and therefore evade antibody-mediated protection [14].