I have noted that at least some resistance to getting vaccines comes from a dislike of the needles themselves. Even for those who are not bothered by the pain or particularly worried about discomfort around the injection site for a day or so, there is often a sense that it is just somehow unnatural to put pointy things into your body and leave something artificial there. Whatever the hoped-for benefit, it just seems like a creepy thing to do. The frequency with which anti-vaxxers use the word "jab" illustrates m y point.
The engineering department at Tufts noticed this and developed a patch with silk microneedles that can be infused with vaccine. This has spun off a company called Vaxess which has the patches in clinical trials and hopes to have them on the market by 2028.
But wait, there's more! Silk is being used for lots of new things. Works in Progress The Future of Silk, by Hiawatha Bray.
3 comments:
I think that will help with the sort of people who shuffle their feet and say, "Yeah, I really ought to," and then don't, but not with the ones who start with an intuition of "It's unnatural!" or "They don't know what they're doing" or "It's a plot to inject us with nanobots/smart-germs/the-Mark-of-the-Beast(tm)/whatever" and develop a principled resistance to the idea, if not to the pathogens.
The lady doing my IV this morning said that last week she'd been paged to help deal with a man who was utterly terrified of needles. She arrived to find a man with tattoos all over his face.
It’s a niche product, I don’t hold out much hope for wide-spread acceptance. For those with needle phobia, there is increasing availability of nasal sprays for vaccines. It’s got to be cheaper, at any rate. IVs are a different creature, no good substitute for that yet. I feel like I’m committing assault when I have to start an IV on a patient afraid of needles before surgery. Unfortunately, necessary.
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