Vaccines can be delivered through the skin using ultrasound. This method doesn’t damage the skin and eliminates the need for painful needles. To create a needle-free vaccine, Darcy Dunn-Lawless at the University of Oxford and his colleagues mixed vaccine molecules with tiny, cup-shaped proteins. They then applied liquid mixture to the skin of mice and exposed it to ultrasound – like that used for sonograms – for about a minute and a half.
They’re not cool. They’re fast and good for giving lots of shots in a situation where you need to get a lot of people in a hurry - especially if you’re giving multiple vaccinations at the same time.
I got one of those used on me in basic training - a place where you need to vaccinate a few thousand people in about 30 minutes. Each one could do 4 shots at a time, and they had them in multiple configurations so you could get up to 4 in each arm for each “injection” station. We stepped through the line, and you got whatever shots you were missing in your records.
It hurts, like you could imagine a high pressure power washer with a needle-point burst with 4 heads blasting vaccines in your arms. It works, in the machine-like way the military works, and it is highly effective for mass vaccinations. So, I guess it makes it cool, but also it sucks like you’d expect 4-30 vaccines at once would suck.
Grandpa told me about a guy in basic that jerked when they shot it, absolutely tore open his arm.
Fuck that, give me the needle. And I fucking hate needles.
I’m right there with you.
What a wild ride. 😏