When you get a shot, like a flu or COVID vaccination for example, they typically put it in your upper arm or your thigh. Are they just sort of injecting it into the muscle? Or into a vein? Either way, where does it *go*?
I have seen videos of when people get things like local anesthetic where the skin starts to balloon out where they put the liquid. Does that sort of thing happen just deeper in the body? I know our body is mostly liquid but does it just absorb? Maybe redistributed ?
In: Biology
The vaccines you mentioned are injected directly into the muscle. Your muscles already have a bunch of water in them so the water that gets injected is handled with that system.
For the actual vaccine part: your body recognizes that a foreign substance is in you and sends immune cells to fight it/break it down. At first, it’s basically throwing a bunch of random antibodies at it hoping it works. Eventually, your body figures out what works and makes more of those antibodies and retains memory of the infection.
Here’s a paper from Moderna in 2019 if you want to see a small slice of how they developed their delivery platform: https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/nucleic-acids/fulltext/S2162-2531(19)30017-4
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