Vaccinations could be made less painful by treating skin with a vaccine-laden liquid and using ultrasound to push it into the body

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.

  • abraxas@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I think it depends. I went to an ER once that threw me into a wheelchair when the world was spinning post-blood-draw and dropped me off in the hall saying “You’ll be fine!”. That hospital will never get an Ultrasound injector.

    When I got my first COVID vax, however, I took up 20 minutes of the time of 2 on-call doctors and a nurse because my passing out often resembles a seizure. And then I took up one of their very few “just in case” beds for close to 90 minutes. Someone else with a problem with needles waiting for a vax had to wait for the bed to open up. They’d have killed to have said ultrasound injector for people like me.