Nostalgia is a funny thing. One definition is “wistful affection for the past.” But sometimes it seems to mean, “relief after surviving something unpleasant.”
Such is the case with the subject of my Tuesday column: the jet injector. Millions of Americans — especially those who served in the military — remember their encounters with the medical device. They don’t necessarily remember them fondly, but they do feel camaraderie with their literal comrades in arms.
The devices used compressed air to deliver vaccines, forcing the liquid through the skin without a needle. The District’s George Pettie remembers how fast they were.
Wrote George: “Line up front to rear, shirts off. Medics on both sides, ‘shot guns’ in hand. Down the row — ZIT! ZIT! ZIT! ZIT! — two or three in each arm in quick succession. Neither painless nor painful — about the same as the needle. It was 1966. I was 19. U.S. Army.”
That was the same year Jim Galligan was in a Navy boot camp. “As was common in boot camp, dark rumors abounded about everything,” wrote Jim, who lives in Alexandria.
One rumor was that the 10-week boot camp would be cut short because the United States was on the verge of war with China.
“Now that I think of it, boot camp rumors weren’t unlike sitting around a campfire as a kid listening to scary stories,” wrote Jim. “Anyway, the ‘injection’ rumor was that some guy — always in another company — flinched just when the medic was giving him the injection and the air gun ripped a big gash across his arm and required stitches.”
It wasn’t only soldiers who encountered the jet injector. In May 1963, Betsy Thomas Amin-Arsalawas a sophomore at Mount Holyoke College and preparing to spend the summer in Israel for an archaeological program. She needed a yellow fever shot, but no area doctors had access to the vaccine.
“I had to get special permission to go to Westover Air Force base to find it,” wrote Betsy, who lives in the District. “And there I had to stand in line with hundreds of smiling and jeering GIs, stick out my arm and be injected by what looked and sounded to me like a gun. Now I know it was the jet injector!”
Terrence H. Scout was shot in the arm several times as a recruit in the 1960s at “Fort Lost-in-the-Woods, Misery,” a.k.a. Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.
“I was fascinated by the tool; wrote home about it and was sure it was the future,” wrote Terrence, who lives in Purcellville, Va. “Alas, I never saw or heard of it again until your column in today’s Post. Why?”
There are several reasons. One is that the shots required patients to stay still as the end of the gun was applied and the trigger was pulled. The vaccine came out at 1,200 psi and if a person flinched — and the nozzle wasn’t butted up straight against the arm — the powerful stream of liquid could tear the skin.
Nearly every service member who wrote to me mentioned seeing someone who, after the shot, was left with blood streaming down his arm. This did not engender confidence in the people still waiting in line.
But the real problem was infection. In their haste, some operators did not clean the business end of the gun sufficiently between shots. And even when the nozzle was sanitized, pathogens could remain inside the mechanism. An outbreak of hepatitis B at a weight loss clinic in the 1980s was traced to jet injectors. U.S. veterans who developed hepatitis B or hepatitis C at the time were able to successfully file for benefits from the former Veterans Administration.
Jet injectors were used around the world, not just by the military but in developing countries to inoculate against diseases such as cholera, typhoid and smallpox.
What they lacked in finesse they made up in volume. But the risks of bloodborne infection meant that the use of traditional jet injectors by the U.S. military ceased in the 1990s.
Today’s jet injectors are single-use devices. Though they are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration to deliver a coronavirus vaccine, they do deliver flu vaccines. Some don’t deliver a vaccine at all. The J-Tip needle-free injection system uses CO2 to spray liquid anesthesia through the skin. It’s designed to numb tissue in preparation for procedures that require a needle.
Tom Sneeringer of the District got a kick out of one detail in Tuesday’s column: how the commanding officer of some malingerers at Army basic training ordered them to “fall out for plague shots,” forcing them to endure seven jet injector shots in each arm.
Wrote Tom: “I so wish I still had kids in the house, especially kids who act up a lot. ‘Fall out for plague shots’ would have been an extremely handy disciplinary warning.”
Glenn Easton of Chevy Chase, Md., doesn’t pine for the return of the jet injector, but he does fondly recall the little polio vaccine sugar cubes he got as a child. Wrote Glenn: “Forget the air-compressed vaccine and invent an easy and tasty vaccine.”
Glenn, don’t you know that sugar’s bad for you?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/jet-injectors/2021/02/02/23f3b8b0-6578-11eb-886d-5264d4ceb46d_story.html
