It's misleading for 1 of the 5 breakthrough cases profiled in this Globe article to be someone's death, but another interesting thing in this piece is how 2 of the 5 people said their doctor assured them their illness probably wasn't a breakthrough case
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If anything I think that shows that even if the CDC itself never explicitly said so, there was still a widespread belief among medical professionals in May and June that the vaccine = pandemic over for you
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In the scheme of things it's not the biggest problem but we're steering the ship of public communication right now from "if you're vaccinated you won't get covid" to "if you're vaccinated you won't get super sick" but it will take time
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The former idea was really implied by the "masks off" announcement in May, even if that was not its intent. The messaging was botched, perhaps because the CDC saw it as a failure to admit the vaccines were anything but perfect.
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I think the CDC reasonably sees its main goal as preventing severe illness. And they also probably think, reasonably, that if delta was coming there was really nothing to stop that. But now we're stuck with this thing where a lot of people feel like they were misled—again!
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I think it's reasonable enough for the CDC to pick is priorities, but I wish that they'd be clear and nuanced about them. It would be nice if they'd even say "we are trying to prevent collapse of the hospital system; if you care about other things, you're on your own."