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.

    • @takeda
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      31 year ago

      This is what I was thinking when reading the title. That one supposedly was cool, because there was no needle, never seen one in action but I presume there also was no bleeding.

      Yet we don’t see them used today, apparently the biggest reason was that there was a splashback and retrograde follow and then patient’s blood could end up contaminating the nozzle, so basically it was like using the same needle on multiple patients.

      • @buddhabound
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        51 year ago

        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.

        • Alto
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • Neato
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      21 year ago

      It’s how I got some vaccines in gradeschool. To the underside of my upper arm, the fatty bit. Hurt like fuck.

    • Maeve
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      01 year ago

      I think no. I don’t like needles either, but I’ll deal with those first.