Is It too Late To Get A COVID Shot Before Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving week is here, and there’s a good chance your plans for the food-focused holiday are already in place. But if your plans to get the updated COVID-19 vaccine well before the holiday fell through, you may be wondering if it’s too late to get the shot before getting together with family and friends. Should you even bother?

Health officials have advised people to get the updated COVID-19 vaccine ahead of the holidays — at least two weeks before. However, if you’ve missed that deadline, it might still be beneficial to get the jab before you head off to your gatherings ― for multiple reasons.

For starters, there was a worldwide surge in COVID infections this past summer, and some health experts predicted that there might be another wave in the fall and winter months.

“The fall and winter months typically see a higher rate of respiratory viruses like [COVID-19] and influenza, as people are indoors and respiratory viruses like [COVID-19] seem to be able to survive or persist in the cooler temperatures, lower rates of humidity allow for the virus to be spread further,” Dr. Matthew Binnicker, the director of clinical virology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, previously told HuffPost.

And last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report estimating that COVID-19 infections were growing, or likely growing, in eight states across the country.

Additionally, a majority of people in the U.S. may be feeling less and less inclined to get vaccinated. An October Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of Americans say they probably won’t get an updated 2024-25 COVID-19 vaccine. That means there may be a lot of people who are less protected from newer COVID variants this season.

All of those factors are reason enough to consider still getting the shot. But there’s a lot of important information to keep in mind when it comes to the updated vaccines, surges in infections and the constantly changing SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. So if you’re still deciding whether or not it’s worth it to get the vaccine days before Thanksgiving, here’s what to know.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved three 2024-25 COVID-19 vaccines in August: the vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, and the Novavax vaccine.

The updated COVID vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer target the KP.2 variant, which is one of several variants referred…