[Lewis Thomson (OP)]

Scott wants to know the following,

"How close to release to the public, is an alternative method of delivery for the COVID-19 vaccine that does not involve needles?"

What are you thoughts? Provide your views in the comments below...

[Origin]

I've had many injections without needles, the technology has been around for decades,
Here is one type:  https://pharmajet.com/stratis-imsc/

[evan_au]

One of the concerns expressed about the current COVID vaccines is that while most of it stays in your arm muscle, some of it will enter capillaries (or larger blood vessels), and possibly make its way to your heart, where it might trigger myocarditis or pericarditis.

There has been some research into a vaccine delivery method that instead of 1 long needle, it would use (say) 256 very short needles, delivering the vaccine just under the skin. These needles would be fabricated with the type of technology used in the semiconductor industry. The Gates Foundation had invested some money into this research; this may have been the germ of truth in the conspiracy theory that "Bill Gates is going to inject chips under our skin". Of course the part where "Bill Gates controls us all via 5G" was total fabrication.

As a child, I had a polio vaccine which was a drop of liquid on a spoon. You swallowed the droplet.
- For a disease that is often picked up from food, immunizing the digestive system is a good way to go.

For airborne diseases like COVID or Influenza, it would make sense to immunise the nose and lungs, so an inhaled vaccine might be a good way to go. But you aren't quite sure of the dose (eg if the person has a cold with a blocked nose, the vaccine may not reach very far into the lungs).

A number of medicines have been deployed via stick-on patches.

One of the problems in remote regions is to maintain vaccines in a cold state. One radical suggestion I saw was to genetically engineer a tropical fruit (eg a banana tree) to express the vaccine protein. Supposedly, just eating the fruit would deliver the vaccine to your gut.

A surprising way of vaccination is to vaccinate the wild vector animal. For diseases carried by wild animals, vaccine-infused baits have been deployed to reduce the amount of disease circulating in the wild.
- More radical is to vaccinate mosquitoes carrying dengue fever or yellow fever with Wolbachia bacteria, which reduces the ability of the mosquitoes to carry human pathogens
- Even more radical (currently with a worldwide moratorium) is the idea of a gene drive to wipe out an entire species, like Aedes Egyptii, which has spread around the world, far from its nominal Egyptian range.

https://www.worldmosquitoprogram.org/en/work/wolbachia-method/how-it-works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive#Applications