Just because “we the CDC” didn’t fund it doesn’t make it any less true.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8369496/
Strange that the study would focus on individuals who received a 250-μg dose. The adult dose is 100-μg (https://reference.medscape.com/drug/mrna-1273-moderna-covid-...). Yes, the study states that key findings were validated with 8 participants who received the regular dosage, but still seems odd to me.
The comparison dataset is explained as: "The convalescent plasma samples were characterized in earlier studies (13–16) and grouped into an early time point of 15 to 60 days after symptom onset and a late time point of 100 to 150 days after symptom onset."
So the comparison was between vaccinated individuals, most of whom received a higher dose than is being given out, to infected individuals, and the time periods don't exactly line up. For the vaccinated dataset, the time periods were 7 and 90 days after the second dose. For the other dataset, the time periods were 15-60 days, and 100-150 days after symptom offset.
Deeper into the study, there is also this: "The escape maps of the 100-μg cohort resembled those of the 250-μg cohort and fell into the 456/484-targeting, core-targeting, or flat categories (fig. S6). Although the sample sizes are small, and a higher fraction of the 100-μg dose escape maps were flat than for the 250-μg cohort (4 of 8 versus 5 of 14, respectively), this suggests that 100- and 250-μg doses elicit antibody responses similar in the breadth of their RBD-binding specificity."