German bakery's syringe cakes help the COVID medicine go down

BERLIN: A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down at a bakery in the western German town of Dortmund, which is celebrating the year of the coronavirus vaccine with syringe-shaped cakes.

It is not the first time Schuerner's Baking Paradise has sold coronavirus spin-offs: last year, as household essentials vanished from supermarket shelves in panic buying, they created cakes shaped like newly-scarce toilet-rolls.

But owner Tim Kortuem initially worried that baking up a tasty syringe would be a step too far.

With vaccination now under way in most of the world, public health officials fret that nervousness about new medicines will slow the uptake of vaccines designed to end a pandemic that has claimed some 2 million lives and devastated the global economy.

"First we were a bit sceptical whether it would be a bit too macabre," he said. "But then we did it after all. Because even for anti-vaxxers it's funny. It is a vaccine without any side effects. And you can come back and get another one because it is so yummy."

There is no evidence that this cake, flavoured with marzipan, will do anything to protect buyers from the coronavirus. Indeed, given the correlation between excess weight and serious cases of the disease, it may do just the opposite.

But nobody eats cakes for health reasons.