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.
Fwiw, my kid who was like that still hates needles, she just has better ways of coping now. The other kid likes to watch it go in, doesn’t bother her a bit.
Both get an ice cream cone on the way home.
Of course being clenched up with fear makes it more painful too, so at some point not in the middle of the screaming, make sure they know to try to relax that arm muscle even if the rest of their body is rigid with fear. And to remember it’s going to take maybe 10 seconds so don’t pull away. (It will take less, but kids count fast)
It’s too bad we can’t let them do it themselves, it might make it easier.
Also tell the person administering it to do it slowly. In my experience, most of the pain was from them doing it too fast. Something about the fluid stretching the muscle in painful ways before it can spread out, or something.
That tracks with my experience. I’m shot-tolerant, so I have the calmness to observe. Of course, some are also just inherently more irritating/painful than others, and there’s different volumes of liquid as well.
For instance, if you’re shot-averse, get Pfizer Covid rather than Moderna Covid. It’s ⅓ of the size/dose.