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.
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.