Your Vaccinated Immune System Is Ready for Breakthroughs
A new dichotomy has begun dogging the pandemic discourse. With the rise of the über-transmissible Delta variant, experts are saying you’re either going to get vaccinated, or going to get the coronavirus.
For some people—a decent number of us, actually—it’s going to be both.
Coronavirus infections are happening among vaccinated people. They’re going to keep happening as long as the virus is with us, and we’re nowhere close to beating it. When a virus has so thoroughly infiltrated the human population, post-vaccination infections become an arithmetic inevitability. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, being vaccinated does not mean being done with SARS-CoV-2.
Post-vaccination infections, or breakthroughs, , but they . They also aren’t proof that the shots are . These cases are, on average, —and, it appears, less likely to pass the pathogen; it does not erase the protection that’s already been built. Rather than setting up fragile and penetrable shields, vaccines reinforce the defenses we ,so that we can encounter the virus safely and potentially build further upon that protection.
