Yes, very helpful for my basic ignorance, though my specific question was about the study's apparent finding that the standard vaccine schedule wasn't effective against omicron: I wanted to know if the vaccine+ booster appears to be more successful against omicron simply because the the booster subject has antibodies from reacting to the recent booster (rather than the body mounting an antibody response based on what it learned from the original vaccine).
Does that distinction make sense? Could be nonsense. I'm sorry to say I don't have the sciencey vocabulary.
And I appreciate LouisGossett's attempt to explain things to me too but his "less complex" answer was still entirely over my head.
Let me take a shot at a very simplified bottom line.
The body has multiple pathways and methods of fighting disease via the immune system. The Cell paper is discussion of results from investigating one specific pathway, called "humoral." The Cell paper showed it wasn't particularly effective at neutralizing the Corona virus. The last two paragraphs list five other kinds of immune responses that
they did not investigate.
Hospitalizations and deaths among those fully vaccinated suggest strongly that some immune response processes are very effective and that those responses are activated by the vaccines. Which ones and how are questions for further research. That research is underway.
Here is an imperfect analogy. Many statics are compiled after a football game. These stats help explain who won and who lost. Rushing yardage is one. If I told you team A had over 400 yards rushing and team B had less than half that, it would be easy to conclude that team A likely won. Now, if I told you that team B actually scored more points and won, You would be saying how did that happen? What are the rest of the statistics?
The paper showed that humoral antibody neutralization of the virus was not effective, like team B's run defense.
Because of the massive differences in severe illness, hospitalizations and deaths between the vaxxed and unvaxxed, some of other immune system pathways must be working better in vaccinated individuals. Just like team B had other parts of their football game working well enough to win.