Selective Vaccination

Medical studies show that any type of vaccination, single or combined, can cause damage, so I don't think one is any safer over another.

However, if you have decided to vaccinate or selectively vaccinate, we have put together this page.

Can I choose Some Vaccines And Not Others?

Yes. For instance, if you didn't want the 5-in-1 but you still wanted meningitis C, you could refuse the 5-in-1 and accept the meningitis C.

If your child has had a previous adverse reaction that you think is due to pertussis vaccine, your GP may be able to order in a DT vaccine instead. Some GP's refuse because their government guideline is to give the 5-in-1.

If you object to the 5-in-1, but still wanted DPT, you could buy it privately from a private vaccine clinic.

At this time, single measles, mumps, rubella, injectable polio and single tetanus vaccines are available at some private clinics. If you want this option but don't know where to go, please contact us and we'll tell you.

If you want single rubella vaccine without the aborted fetal tissue in it, you can ask the private clinics to source a brand made without it. This is becoming increasingly difficult, though, as some manufacturer's, like Merck, are stopping making their single vaccines and the combination shots like MMR always contain fetal tissue.

Do I Have To Start Vaccinating At 2 Months?

No. You don't have to vaccinate at all, but if you choose to, you can choose when you start. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that early vaccination causes auto-immune problems and even cot death.

You could choose to delay the first shots until one year old to reduce the number of shots.
For instance, pertussis is not fatal in children over one year old, so if you waited till your child was over one, you wouldn't require the pertussis vaccine. You would also only require one dose of meningitis C and prevnar as opposed to the several doses 'required' starting at 2 months.

You could wait until your child was 2 before you gave any vaccines. When Japan changed their schedule and started it at 2 years, their cot death disappeared. The child's blood/brain barrier isn't fully developed till age 3, so some parents wait until the pre-school shots at that age and just give those.

It is entirely your choice and if a doctor says you can't, they're lying.

If I Have Started Vaccinating But Change My Mind, Is It Safe To Stop Half Way Through A Course?

Yes. Vaccines contain things like aluminium which have an accumulative effect (they build up in the body) so actually the more shots you have, the more risk of side-effects.

There won't be any adverse effect from abandoning a course of injections.

What Safety Considerations Are There?

If you choose multiple combination vaccines, bear in mind that if your child has a reaction, it will be difficult to tell which vaccine he is reacting to, which will make it difficult to report and difficult to monitor vaccine safety in general.

Consider using only single vaccines so you can accurately identify what your child is reacting to, should he have a reaction. Single viruses are also less of a challenge to his immune system.

Make sure your child is not contraindicated before the shots. (Read the contraindications on this site). If he has suffered from fits in the past, if he's had a previous adverse reaction, if he's feverish, got an infection or an allergy to any of the vaccine ingredients, DON'T vaccinate him. If he has a cold, postpone the shot until he is well. Sick children should never be vaccinated.

Make sure your doctor or nurse discusses your family history with you in detail prior to the shot.

Ask to see the manufacturer's data sheet for the jab prior to it being given so you are fully aware of side-effects. You can also do this to make sure they are giving your child the right vaccine. I have known doctor's who've purposefully given DPT when the parent requested tetanus and if you don't check the vaccine leaflet and packaging, how are you to know what your child is being given?

Make sure your doctor records the manufacturer's name and lot numbers of the vaccines in your child's red book. You will need these if your child suffers an adverse event, if you wish to report it or make a claim for compensation.

Give your child 3,000mgs vitamin C supplement per day for 1 month prior to vaccination and 1 month after. Vitamin C can stop adverse events and protect against sudden death after vaccination (see cot death page for details). Sometimes high doses of vitamin C will give your child loose stools, but it is not harmful. You cannot overdose on vitamin C as any that is not used is reabsorbed by the body. It is vital for a vaccinated child.

Consider giving homeopathic nosodes afterwards to ease any adverse effects.

Serious adverse effects including brain damage and death can occur rarely, and in these cases, homeopathy won't help.

How Can I Ease The Pain of Injections?

These days with babies being given three shots in one sitting, relieving the pain is paramount.

One of my daughter's has a genetic condition and when she had a blood test, her arm was numbed with lidocaine anesthetic beforehand, so she couldn't feel the pain.

It made me wonder why they don't do this when they vaccinate babies - unless it is because they have so many to do, they wouldn't have time to ensure it's pain free?

You can insist on an anesthetic preparation being given prior to any shots. If they say no, tell them no shots until your baby is numbed. I am sure they would rapidly agree. I don't consent to any blood tests on my children until they do this.

Breast feeding during the shots has been shown to reduce pain. This is because breast feeding releases endorpins, the body's natural pain killer, and it also comforts the baby.

Objective

To investigate interventions that affect pain reduction during vaccination in infants and children attending a well-child unit.
Study design

A consecutive sample of 243 children between age 0 and 48 months receiving their routine vaccinations was randomly assigned to 1 of the study groups. A total of 158 infants under age 6 months were randomly assigned to breast-feeding or no breast-feeding during immunization, and 85 children age 6 to 48 months were randomly assigned to receive 12% sucrose solution, lidocaine-prilocaine cream, or no intervention. All children were evaluated for crying time and pain score by a pediatrician using the Neonatal Infant Pain Scale (NIPS) for those under age 12 months and the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Pain Scale (CHEOPS) for those over age 12 months.
Results

Breast-feeding in infants under age 6 months and use of sucrose or lidocaine-prilocaine in children age 6 to 48 months significantly reduced crying time and pain scores compared with controls. No difference in outcome was seen between the sucrose and lidocaine-prilocaine treatment groups.
Conclusions

Here we expand on previous findings by demonstrating that breast-feeding may have an analgesic effect up to age 6 months and that in older children, both sucrose and lidocaine-prilocaine reduce vaccination pain.

Source: Journal of Pediatrics, 2003 - D . Dilli , I . Küçük , Y . Dallar).

If the staff don't want you to breast feed during the shot, as I have heard some mums say, don't consent to it. It's your decision and will be on your terms.

53% of Formula Fed Babies Suffer Fever After Vaccination and Only 25% of Fully Breast Fed Babies do - Make Sure You Exclusively Breast Feed so Your Child Has Less Chance of Vaccine Side-Effects!

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of breastfeeding on the risk for fever after routine immunizations.

METHODS: A prospective cohort study was conducted at a pediatricvaccination center in Naples, Italy. The mothers of the infants scheduled to receive routine immunizations were instructed on how to measure and record infant temperature on the evening of the vaccination and for the subsequent 3 days. The information about the incidence of fever was obtained by telephone on the third day after vaccination. The relative risk for fever in relation to the type of breastfeeding was estimated in multivariate analyses that adjusted for vaccine dose, maternal education and smoking, and number of other children in the household.

RESULTS: A total of 460 infants were recruited, and information on the
outcome was obtained for 450 (98%). Fever was reported for 30 (25%),48 (31%), and 94 (53%) of the infants who were being exclusively breastfed, partially breastfed, or not breastfed at all, respectively (P
.01). The relative risk for fever among infants who were exclusively and partially breastfed was 0.46 (95% confidence interval: 0.33– 0.66) and 0.58 (95% confidence interval: 0.44–0.77), respectively. The protection conferred by breastfeeding persisted even when considering the role of several potential confounders.

CONCLUSIONS: In this study, breastfeeding was associated with a decreased incidence of fever after immunizations.

Source: Pediatrics 2010;125:e1448–e1452

Even without vaccination, a disease ultimately becomes extinct on its own - Scientists say Selective Vaccination Better than Mass Vaccination

With the current outbreak of the flu season in Israel, hospitals are reporting overcrowding, and doctors are advising people who have not yet been vaccinated against flu to get their shots.

Surprisingly, however, three physicists -- one from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and two others from Michigan State University – have developed an unconventional, theoretical strategy for intensive but limited vaccination against infectious diseases (such as flu) that would replace the practice of mass inoculation over a prolonged period. The physicists developed their theory using a technique borrowed from quantum mechanics.

How does it work? The program is based on accelerating the natural extinction of the disease through selective vaccination.

Prof. Baruch Meerson of the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University explains the strategy:

“Consider an unfortunate situation when an infectious disease has spread over a population, and a certain portion of the population is sick. Most of the infected individuals recover from the disease and develop immunity to it. On the other hand, the infected individuals can spread the disease in the population through contacts with susceptible individuals.

“To reduce the infection spread, one can vaccinate all possible susceptible individuals. If they are all willing to be vaccinated and there is enough vaccine for everybody, the vaccination campaign will eradicate the disease with certainty. Very often, however, a large portion of susceptible individuals refuse to be vaccinated. In addition, a vaccine can be in short supply, expensive to produce, or difficult to store.”

How to cope with such conditions is the problem tackled by the three physicists: Meerson from the Hebrew University and Prof. Mark Dykman and Dr. Michael Khasin from Michigan State University in the US. (Although presently working in the US, Dr. Khasin earned his doctorate at the Hebrew University.)

The researchers made use of the fact that, even without vaccination, a disease ultimately becomes extinct on its own. But for large populations, the typical time it takes for the disease to disappear by itself can be very long. Essentially, Meerson and colleagues suggested an optimal vaccination strategy that accelerates, in the maximum possible way, this natural process of disease disappearance.

In this strategy, the vaccine must be delivered to the most susceptible populations (say children in a particular class where a certain percentage of the pupils have come down with the flu) in the form of short but intensive vaccination periods, adjusted to match the “ups and downs” of waves that occur in the natural spread of infectious disease.

Also, when the disease has a seasonal variation (like the common cold), that factor must be taken into consideration in the vaccination timing calculations.

The question that still remains is why physicists took on a problem belonging to epidemiology? Meerson says that the mathematical model that he and his colleagues used in their analysis closely resembles a quantum-mechanical model that physicists use when analyzing the dynamics of microscopic particles (such as electrons) in miniature traps. By adjusting the size of the traps upwards or downwards, one increases or decreases the chances of the electrons escaping. It is this unexpected analogy that made it possible to make the surprising conclusions about the periodic vaccination protocol – that is, to show how targeted, selective vaccination can indeed limit the “escape” of infectious germs and allow the disease to die down through largely a natural process.

Meerson and colleagues have yet to model their periodic vaccination scheme using real-world data. But they say their calculations show that vaccinating just a few percent of the population could reduce the time it takes to eradicate a disease from, say, five months, to between three and four. The researchers hope to continue refining their work on this phenomenon.

Source: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 5th January 2011.

http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge129422769832688760

Combination Vaccines More Ineffective Than Single Ones

A combination vaccine developed to reduce the number of vaccines infants receive appears to provide less immunity than the vaccines administered individually, according to a study in the April 13 issue of JAMA.

Infants in the United States receive up to 20 separate vaccine injections over 5 immunization encounters at ages 2, 4, 6, 12, and 18 months to protect against disease due to hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, H influenzae type b, and pneumococcus. The inclusion of MenC would add a further 3 to 4 doses to the U.S. regimen. The development of combination vaccines has become a priority. The combining of pneumococcal and meningococcal conjugate vaccines has the potential to spare U.S. infants up to 4 extra injections by age 18 months and to decrease parental and clinician concerns about the number of vaccinations in early childhood.

Jim P. Buttery, F.R.A.C.P., formerly of the University of Oxford, Churchill Hospital, Headington, Oxford, U.K., and colleagues conducted a study to determine the immunogenicity and safety of a combination 9-valent pneumococcal–group C meningococcal conjugate candidate vaccine (Pnc9-MenC). The phase 2 randomized controlled trial was conducted from August 2000 to January 2002 and enrolled 240 healthy infants aged 7 to 11 weeks from 2 U.K. centers, with home follow-up visits at ages 2, 3, 4, and 5 months. Infants received Pnc9-MenC (n = 120) or monovalent group C meningococcal conjugate vaccine (MenC) (n = 120) administered in addition to routine immunizations (diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and whole-cell pertussis [DTwP], Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) polyribosylribitol phosphate-tetanus toxoid protein conjugate, oral polio vaccine).

The researchers found: "Pnc9-MenC combination vaccine administered to infants at ages 2, 3, and 4 months demonstrated reduced group C meningococcal immunogenicity compared with MenC vaccine. The immunogenicity of concomitantly administered Hib and DTwP vaccines was also diminished. The Pnc9-MenC vaccine was safe and immunogenic for all contained pneumococcal serotypes."

"These results highlight the unpredictability of immune responses to individual vaccine antigens after incorporating multiple antigens into combination vaccines and underline the importance of assessing the immunogenicity of all coadministered vaccine antigens in prelicensure trials. The Pnc9-MenC vaccine as tested may not be a suitable replacement for individual MenC or pneumococcal glycoconjugate vaccines," the authors conclude.

Source: JAMA. 2005;293:1751-1758.

Mothers Who Selective Vaccinate

Cut to now I was pregnant and I had to make all these decisions when my daughter was about to be born. My doctor asked me if I wanted Luna Marie to receive the standard vaccinations upon birth. Uh, WHAT?!

First, I didn’t even know that they did that, ya know? Fresh outta the hot, steamy uterus, they give babies shots? Yes, I learned. One is for hepatitis B and they also put antibiotics in the baby’s eyes. Who knew? Of course, me — the pain in the butt patient — asked, “Why? Why? Why?!”

The answer I got was that the antibiotics were in case I had a sexually transmitted infection called chlamydia, and thus Luna Marie would contract it when passing through the birth canal. I thought “Huh?” Now, I already knew I had to have a cesarean because they thought Luna Marie was 10 lbs. and was four days overdue, so how could she possibly get that since she wasn’t coming out my hoo-ha? And the hepatitis B shot was in case I had unprotected sex with lots of partners or used intravenous drugs while pregnant.

My brain went, “WHAT? Wait, WHAT?!” If you know anything about me as a pregnant woman, sex was the last, last, SUPER LAST thing that I wanted to have with ANYBODY, at ANYTIME, ANYWHERE! So how could I contract or have or give her hepatitis B?

I knew I didn’t have any of that stuff. Why would I let them give the antibiotics and vaccine to Luna Marie?

So after much contemplating, stressing and debate, Kent and I decided we didn’t want her to have those inoculations. I learned I could write a birth plan on a sheet of paper and give it to the hospital and they would honor it. I was nervous but Kent and I felt in our hearts and minds we were doing the right thing.

Source: People Magazine, July 7th 2010.

Constance Marie elected not to give her daughter any vaccines until she reached the age of 2, and not to give Hep B vaccine. For her full story, see:

http://celebritybabies.people.com/2010/07/07/constance-maries-blog-to-vaccinate-or-not-to-vaccinate/

Should Children Be Vaccinated?

I remember taking my new baby boy, at 8 weeks of age, for his well-baby checkup that would include his first round of vaccinations. I sometimes think it was harder for me holding that sweet, little angel knowing what was about to steal that sweet smile from his face, not to mention the internal struggle of questioning am I really doing what’s best for my child.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the pediatrician, I was doing exactly what was best for my child. But at what point do we trust ourselves to be the sole decider of what is best for our children?

Even the person with the best planning instincts stumbles into parenthood. It’s a new frontier. Sure we’ve observed it around us storing ideas of “do versus do not”, even been a piece of the puzzle as children ourselves. But we are never truly prepared to become parents, even with all the books, magazines, internet and personal advice from others, until we walk that path ourselves. It is a personal journey that you can’t completely prepare for and you learn as you travel both smooth and bumpy roads, stumbling and finding your way again.

Vaccination schedules are ever changing and I never thought of refusing a vaccination until the HPV vaccine came along. My main reasoning here being that I didn’t need it so why should my children need it. I would not be vaccinating my daughter for HPV. But then I was intrigued when my pediatrician suggested that my boys get this vaccination. I politely refused but left thinking that was insane!

Source: Acworth Patch, 29th February 2012.

Cindy elected not to let her children have the HPV vaccine. For the full story, see:

http://acworth.patch.com/articles/children-vaccination-hpv-disease-flu-cdc

Dr. David Davis MD Talks about Vaccines, PVC and Crib Death

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LfipChRciY&feature=fvwrel

Dr. David Davis talks about how PVC and vaccines are the two biggest causes of crib death in this very candid interview. He also admits he did not ever report any vaccine reactions or illnesses in his practice and says around 99% of doctors do not report vaccine reactions.

Dr. Davis advocates getting rid of PVC and using less vaccines on a delayed schedule.

Needle Free Vaccines Coming Soon

Needle-free vaccines sound like just what the doctor ordered--less painful, less stressful for small children, easier to administer, lower risk of needlestick injuries and fewer sharps for diposal. A team of engineers at MIT have developed a jet delivery technology that shoots the vaccine (or therapeutic) through the skin and is less painful than a needle.

There are already a number of needle-free (or needleless) devices on the market, but most of these just deliver one dose to one depth. What makes MIT's system different is that it can deliver a range of doses to a number of different depths by controlling the speed and force of a fine jet powered by a technology known as a Lorentz-force actuator. This is powered by a combination of an electric current and a magnetic field, forcing out a high-speed jet of liquid at almost the speed of sound. The research is published in the journal Medical Engineering & Physics.

Lack of sleep may make vaccines less effective

Some vaccines may not work as well in people who don't get a good night's sleep, a new study suggests.

In the study, adults who slept fewer than six hours a night were less likely to be adequately protected against hepatitis B after getting a hepatitis B shot than people who slept more than seven hours a night.

Lack of sleep may have detrimental effects on the immune system processes that are important for vaccine response, the researchers said.

"While there is more work to be done in this area, in time, physicians and other health care professionals who administer vaccines may want to consider asking their patients about their sleep patterns, since lack of sleep may significantly affect the potency of the vaccination," said Aric Prather, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Research has shown that poor sleep can make people susceptible to illnesses such as upper respiratory infections. But it is unclear whether sleep affects the specific immune responses known to protect against infection.

The new study involved 125 people who were between ages 40 and 60, and in good health. Each participant was given the standard, three-dose hepatitis B vaccine: the first and second doses were administered a month apart, followed by a booster shot at six months.

Participants' antibody levels were measured six months after the final vaccination. (Antibodies are proteins that the immune system produces to fight foreign invaders, such as viruses.)

All the participants completed sleep diaries detailing their bedtime and wake time, and 88 participants wore electronic sleep monitors known as actigraphs.

Eighteen participants had antibody levels that were so low that it meant they did not receive adequate protection from the vaccine.

People who slept fewer than six hours nightly on average were 11.5 times more likely to be unprotected by the vaccine than people who slept more than seven hours on average, the researcher said.

"These findings should help raise awareness in the public health community about the clear connection between sleep and health," Prather said.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research and the National Institutes of Health. It will be published in the August issue of the journal SLEEP. Prather conducted the work while at the University of Pittsburgh.

Source: Health Today, 1st August 2012 - http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/08/01/13072300-lack-of-sleep-may-make-vaccines-less-effective?lite

The importance of Vitamin C in Preventing Vaccine Side-Effects

Although Kalokerinos was one of the first to draw attention to this problem in human infants, the scientific literature on the relationship between vitamin C status and resistance to bacterial toxins goes back a long way. Work on guinea pigs by Harde,¹⁵ by King and Menten,⁵ by Jungblut and Zwemer,¹⁶ and by Kligler¹⁷ has shown that vitamin C deficiency increases the susceptibility of these animals to diphtheria toxin. Moreover, these workers found that vitamin C has a direct detoxifying effect on diphtheria toxin, both in vivo and in vitro. King and Menten observed that there is a wide zone of vitamin C deficiency, without the appearance of scurvy, where physiological processes are subnormal and the animal is more sensitive to bacterial toxin. Any infection, even the common cold, causes a sharp drop in the blood leukocyte ascorbic acid concentration, so Kalokerinos’ advice to avoid inoculation of children when they are ill for any reason would seem to have been entirely correct.

In addition to providing protection against diphtheria toxin, vitamin C is also protective against the toxins of four different varieties of gas gangrene bacteria in mice, as shown by Büller, Souto and Lima¹⁸ (Table 1, p.140) and against tetanus toxin in rats, as shown by Dey¹⁹ (Table 2, p.141). These findings are remarkable in that both rats and mice, unlike humans, have the ability to synthesize ascorbic acid in their livers; clearly sometimes even they do not make enough ascorbic acid to provide maximal protection from these bacterial toxins.

Fukada and Koyama²⁰ demonstrated that pretreatment with ascorbic acid (500 mg/day), mixed in their soybean curd diet, protected rabbits against the toxic effects of Salmonella typhi endotoxin. Ascorbic acid saturation markedly ameliorated the depletion of liver glycogen after endotoxin, both in intact and in adrenalectomized rabbits, and completely prevented the attendant hypoglycemia.

Table 1. Protective activity of L-ascorbic acid 10 mg daily, given intramuscularly to mice for 3 days preceding a single or a double LD50 dose of four different gas gangrene toxins. Note the surprisingly good protective activity by ascorbic acid, even in mice which make their own ascorbic acid.

This relationship has recently been confirmed by Johnston et al.²² who found that 22 out of 135, or 16 per cent, of volunteers on the Arizona State University campus at Tempe, Arizona, had a subnormal plasma vitamin C status (< 28 μmol/L or < 0.5 mg/100 mL), associated with elevated blood histamine concentrations, which were significantly reduced by supplementation with vitamin C.

Addendum

The vitamin C status of the general population is much poorer than is generally appreciated, as shown by Johnston and Thompson,²³ who found plasma vitamin C deficiency (less than 0.2mg/100mL) in 6 per cent and vitamin C depletion (less than 0.5mg/100mL) in 30 per cent of people attending a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) clinic in Tempe, Arizona.

Likewise the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III)²⁴ for the years 1988-94 revealed plasma ascorbic acid deficiency (< 0.2 mg/100mL) in 12% of Caucasians, 15% of Blacks and 9% of Mexican Americans.

The only reason that this is not generally known is that hospital laboratories do not usually measure vitamin C.

The concerned citizens of the National Vaccine Information Center believe that many instances of infant death or brain damage have been caused by inoculations. However, the U.S. National Vaccine Advisory Committee believes that there is almost never such a causal relationship.

Conclusions

It is suggested that any infant with coryza, or any infant or adult receiving an unduly large number of inoculations at one time, should receive supplementary vitamin C in orange juice, before or at the time of the inoculation. Vitamin C should also be given by injection to any infant who convulses or shows any other untoward reaction within a day or two after inocula-tion. Moreover, inoculation should be post-poned in any infant whose health is seri-ously compromised.

Vaccinations, Inoculations and Ascorbic Acid

Table 2. Efficiency of vitamin C in counteracting the toxicity of tetanus antigen in adult rats

TreatmentNo. of Symptoms Survival Rats

2MLD tetanus toxin i.m. 5All convulsed and None died within 47-65hrs.

2MLD tetanus toxin i.m. with 5 Only very mild local All1g AA (per kg body weight) i.p. tetanus after 48 hrs.and Ig AA/kg b.i.d. for 3 days i.p.

AA 1g/kg b.i.d. for 3 days 5 No signs of toxicity Allthen 2 MLD tetanus toxin

2 MLD tetanus toxin. 5 Convulsions arrested All AA1 g/kg i.p. only when convulsions began after 16 to 26 hrs. and continued b.i.d. for 3 days

2 MLD tetanus toxin. 10 All Animals anesthetized after 40 to 47 hours when general tetanic convulsion occurred then AA 300 mg. given IV

From P.K. Dey¹⁹
AA = L-ascorbic acid; MLD=minimum lethal dose.; 2 MLD=twice minimun lethal dose; i.m.=intramuscular injection;

Painless DNA Vaccines

Patches covered in microscopic needles could tattoo vaccines into the skin to boost a patient’s defense against disease, researchers say.

Vaccines help bodies develop immunity to diseases by exposing immune systems to potential invaders. Scientists are now developing DNA vaccines that deliver genes from contagions into patients; the cells of vaccinated people then churn out molecules from those potential intruders that function like wanted signs, helping immune systems recognize dangerous threats.

In principle, DNA vaccines possess a number of benefits over regular vaccines. For example, instead of wasting time and resources generating and purifying proteins from germs for use in vaccines, manufacturers can simply get the human body to do the manufacturing work. However, so far DNA vaccines have not proven very effective in humans, perhaps because there has been no good way to give patients enough of the vaccine in a shot.

Researchers coat microneedles with biodegradable films containing the vaccine as well as a variety of other molecules, such as compounds that stimulate immune systems and help cells absorb DNA.

These microneedles can be designed to disrupt only the most superficial layers of the skin to avoid nerve endings and blood vessels, making them painless and safer than hypodermic needles.