You're the (US) government. You want to prevent deaths from Covid. Research keeps generally concluding that previous Covid infection natural immunity is roughly as good as vaccine induced. You realize if you message this to the public and allow equality to vax-passes, never-vax people will be incentivized to now try and get covid so they can be restriction-less without being vaxxed, further spreading covid. You decide not to message this, leaving some astute researchers perplexed.
Natural immunity might be as good (or even better) than vaccine induced, but comes with a risk of hospitalization or death. If you're cynical, this means lost tax revenue for your government.
Is anyone really surprised by this? All evidence suggests that getting the vaccine strictly increases your immunity to Covid, even if you've already had the disease.
Definitely but unfortunately minimally. In a hypothetical world of 67% vaccine induced and 80% previous infection (hard to know the actual), we would have people more fearful of being around the 80%'s than the 67%'s. If so, we have a similar noble lie situation as the Mar 2020 "masks don't work", where we are so focused on getting the 80% to 85% (and other dilemmas alluded to by my previous comment) we are damaging trust with possibly worse knock on effects.
