Why vaccines are injected in your upper arm muscle, and not in your veins
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ThuThursday 7
updated
ThuThursday 7
JanJanuary 2021 at 10:01pm
Millions of deltoids belonging to high-risk people are being injected with a COVID vaccine. But why that part of the body?
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Like most adult jabs, this slew of vaccines — including those developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca and Pfizer and BioNTech — are injected into the deltoid: the thick, fleshy muscle of your upper arm.
Despite using a raft of different technologies, COVID-19 vaccines all aim to do the same thing: introduce our immune system to antigens — specific parts of a disease-causing organism which the body uses to identify the invader — to shore up defences against the disease down the track.