Kamala Harris got her booster shot for the Moderna vaccine on Saturday. Although at age 57 she’s below the normal age limit for getting a booster (65+), she’s eligible since she’s considered “at risk” because her duties place her in contact with many people, including Uncle Joe.
Watch the short video below and see how she gets the shot: in particular, notice how the guy pinches her arm before sticking the needle into the raised-up skin. That’s WRONG!
Well, actually, it’s not wrong for her, but neither is it the right way to inject vaccine into a healthy person when the vaccine is, like the Covid jab, supposed to be injected intramuscularly. Here’s part of an article from KOLD.com in Tucson, Arizona: Click on screenshot below to read the whole thing.
Here’s the salient bit:
We asked Tucson family physician Dr. Cadey Harrel to show us the proper way to administer a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.
Harrel said instead of pinching the skin, she spreads the skin to create a flat surface when injecting an intramuscular vaccine.
Following our investigation, the KOLD Investigates Team received an email from Dr. Nimrod Rahamimov at the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariyya, Israel.
Rahamimov is the head of the Department of Orthopedics and Spine Surgery at the Galilee Medical Center.
Rahamimov said he noticed people’s arms being pinched as COVID-19 vaccines were administered. He searched the medical literature and scholarly articles for any information on concerns of improper COVID mRNA vaccine administration.
“There was absolutely nothing,” Rahamimov said.
So, he expanded his search, which can be read HERE.
“I was Googling to see if it was mentioned anywhere else and I fell on your story,” Rahamimov said.
Rahamimov said Harrel’s demonstration is correct, but he wanted to find out what would happen if the vaccine was administered into a pinched arm. His hypothesis was that skin bunching might prevent the needle from reaching the muscle, instead, injecting the vaccine into subcutaneous fat.
To put this theory to the test, Rahamimov recruited 60 volunteers, both males and females.
And the results of the test are below in a paper in Vaccine by Dr. Rahaminov and his colleagues (click on screenshot; access is free).
The upshot is that if you have too much fat on your arm, pinching may cause the needle to not penetrate the muscle below the fat sufficiently to give a good injection. 10% of the people in the trial were in danger of such an outcome, and Americans in general have a high incidence of obesity. Now Kamala isn’t fat—in fact, I think she’s athletic—but in either her case nor in the case of overweight people there should be NO PINCHING. As they say below in the paper “pinching is recommended only in patients with suspected lower muscle mass.” That’s not Kamala, so the doctor that gave her the well-publicized injection set a bad example. To wit:
We have found that in 6/60 (10%) of our study population, skin bunching can create a skin-to-muscle distance of 20 mm or greater, leading to insufficient muscle penetration concerns. 5/6 (83.33%) of these subjects had a BMI greater than 30. Searching the PubMed and Google scholar databases, we have not found another study describing the differences in skin-to-muscle distance when bunching the skin over the injection site or if the needle is directed at a different angle than 900. Using real-time sonography we were able to visualize this substantial difference and quantify it.
Ten out of the sixty subjects (10–60, 16.6%) were obese, having a BMI of 30 or more. As having a skin-to-deltoid distance of 20 mm or more strongly correlated with obesity, and the obesity rate in the Israeli general population is 23.2% for men and 29% for women, our study under-represented this group, hence it is reasonable to assume that more than 10% of the general population will have an injection depth of 20 mm or more if their skin is bunched while receiving their vaccination. In countries where obesity is more prevalent – these differences may be even higher.
. . . Muscle bunching is indeed recommended only in patients with suspected lower muscle mass, but in common practice this recommendation is difficult to implement for two reasons: BMI is not always calculated, especially in mass-immunization efforts such as the current pandemic, and because muscle bunching requires anatomical understanding and some practice to do correctly. The two radiologists performing the measurements in our study found that even when done under US control, some practice and repeated attempts were needed to actually bunch the deltoid muscle. We feel that the vaccine provider in the field, sometimes a person with only basic training, will find this task beyond their skill set.
. . . Our study’s main significance is in the multipliers. Although the immune effects of inadequate IM penetration while receiving an mRNA vaccine have not been clinically studied, and the concern is valid in a relatively small number of patients, multiplying this small effect by the large numbers expected to receive mRNA vaccines raises concerns that many millions of people will be under-vaccinated globally, especially in countries where obesity is prevalent. In countries opting for a one-dose regimen, the effect might be more profound as there is no “second chance” if the first was indeed mis-administered.
The lesson for you: they should NOT pinch your skin up when they give you your jab unless for some reason they think you have poor muscle mass and are not obese.
I’m not a doctor—I just play one in college—but I thought this was fun to point out.
So my question is: Why is injecting into subcutaneous fat not as good? Cells are cells, and except for red blood cells they all have the ability to absorb the RNA and make protein. So what is the problem with fat tissue?
Perhaps something to do with reduced vascularization of adipose tissue? Skeletal muscle is well-vascularized, so all the important stuff can get in and out quickly.
Cells are not cells. Fat cells are filled with enormous amounts of lipid (fat) making them many times larger than muscle cells (which aren’t storing anything). With these giant cells, adipose tissue has a much lower cell density than muscle tissue, so far fewer cells are exposed to the vaccine. Also, fat cells are not good antigen presenters, they’re not “designed” to express foreign proteins (encoded by the RNA), so the immune reaction is poor.
Just prior to jabbing someone, I often grab the muscle to ensure the person’s deltoid is relaxed. It also ensures they don’t jump.
I’m told that some doctors do this because patients perceive less pain when the skin is pinched. If that’s the case, the doctor better know what she’s doing.
Doctors were a minority of those administering vaccines in the UK, at least the first doses. Lots were med students, nurses& other trained volunteers. Wonder if that made a difference.
I am, and continue to be, one of those trained volunteers and we’re most definitely taught to spread the skin at the injection site.
Also, obese patients are injected using a longer needle to ensure the vaccine reaches the muscle.
Subcutaneous drug dosing can lead to significantly different pharmacokinetics than intramuscular injection even for the same drug. With mRNA being a highly polar molecule, I can easily imagine that injecting it into fat would be problematic for it’s proper uptake into cells. mRNA is generally not absorbed inside cells and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines encapsulate that mRNA inside fatty nanoparticles which fuse with cells allowing delivery of their payload inside them. Inject them into fat and the mRNA will be unmasked and little to no COVID spike protein will get made, ergo a weak immune response.
The other mistake in the video is that the time between the alcohol swab and the injection was only about 7 seconds. Where an alcohol swab is used (and even this is controversial if the skin is visibly clean…) a minimum of 30 seconds is recommended to enable the skin to dry completely before the needle is inserted.
No one wants to feel the pinch.