Over the weekend, our producer Carmel called up an old friend, Courtney, to see how she was doing.

How have you been feeling lately? I've been okay. Courtney is a dental student in Florida.

Back in June, she was in self-imposed quarantine. She'd spike defever, so she had to skip classes,

get a COVID test. She wasn't worried about it. It's not like she was coughing, she was vaccinated.

She drove herself right over to CVS and walked in. So I went in the store and they have CVS as you

swab yourself and I'm told, the guy who was doing my test, I said, this isn't COVID, I'm vaccinated,

it's totally fine. And did the swab. While I was doing the swab, I sneezed and they make you

wait in your car to get the results and I waited in my car and while I was waiting in my car, I felt

my vaccine site get sore, which was the strangest feeling.

And at that moment, I was like, oh my gosh, I have COVID and I was, I just broke down in tears

because I felt like I had avoided it for so long. Here are the emotions Courtney felt after learning

she had COVID, guilt that she'd sneezed near that guy at CVS, frustration that somehow she was the

one to get one of these breakthrough infections. And a kind of exhaustion too. She felt like she'd

followed the rules. The only place she thinks she could have been exposed was at a bar the weekend

before she got sick, where she looked around and thought, okay, there are a lot of people here

and they're not in masks, but we're mostly outside. Because again, I'm vaccinated and they,

you know, that's what they say. This is it. If you are vaccinated, you are able to, you know, carry on.

And now Courtney's asking herself, if you're vaccinated, are you just able to carry on?

Since I have been sick, I have known one, two, three, four, five, six, seven other people have gotten sick.

Today on the show is the US in the midst of a COVID backslide. How good is it to be

vaxed? How necessary is it to be masked? We'll talk about all of it. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to what next.

Stick around.

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