We have some bad news for your conspiracy-brained antivaxxer uncle — one virologist claims he’s come up with a way to administer vaccines through a frothy mug of beer.
By day, virologist Chris Buck works for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Maryland, where he’s discovered four of the 13 polyomaviruses we know to affect humans, Science News reports. But by night, he runs Gusteau Research Corporation, a one-man shell company he established so he could experiment on his bubbly inoculation: an ingestible polyomavirus vaccine.
To make the beer, Buck engineered a special strain of yeast infused with polyomavirus-like particles. Similar particles, delivered via purified insect chitin, have successfully increased antibody levels in rhesus monkeys tested in India, according a 2023 research study published in the journal Vaccine.
Importantly, Buck’s engineered yeast doesn’t contain live viruses. Consensus among researchers is that they aren’t viable for building ingestible vaccines, as they would simply disintegrate when they make contact with stomach acids, per Science News.
Yet when the virologist and his team attached virus-like particles to live yeast, they discovered the organisms could carry the inoculation load well beyond the stomach of live mice. That had huge implications for inoculation against polyomaviruses, which are mostly found in the urinary track, Buck told Science News.
“We repeated this experiment [on mice] a couple of times. I was reluctant to believe it,” Buck said at the World Vaccine Congress Washington earlier this year. “It felt like an earthquake when I first saw the results emerging.”
Since then, Buck himself has chugged five pints of the brew, along with his brother and other family members.
Buck says that after drinking the experimental suds, antibodies for two of the four subtypes of BK polyomavirus in his blood have reached a safemedical threshold for transplant patients.
Buck’s approach has brewed upsome controversy, to be sure. Two separate panels of experts — a research and an ethics committee — with the National Institute of Health have come out against Buck experimenting on himself with his homebrew in his official capacity as a virologist (hence the shell company, which allows him to experiment as a private business owner).
Though a number of researchers canvassed by Science News agreed that Buck’s style of ingestible vaccine experiments are sorely needed, they worry his cavalier attitude might backfire, making certain anti-vaxxers even more paranoid than they already were. Just imagine: what’s to stop them from dumping vaccines into cans of Budweiser?
“Coming up with new modes of administration of vaccines is way overdue,” Arthur Caplan, former head of medical ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine told Science News. Still, he added that the virologist’s homebrew could “take a good idea he has and ruin it… vaccine doubts and fears and anti-vaccine attitudes could easily undercut what could be something useful.”
Writing in a non-peer reviewed essay posted on his personal blog, Buck said that he doesn’t take the controversy personally. “The basic problem for vaccine scientists has been our collective failure to understand the anti-vaxxer viewpoint,” he wrote.
“Our response for the past half century has been to imagine that we can rebuild public trust in vaccines with displays of increasingly stringent FDA approval standards. This approach backfired,” Buck pontificates. “Imagine if I set out to do safety testing on a banana, and I dressed up in a hazmat suit and handled the banana with tongs… you’d think: ‘wow, it looks like bananas might be about as safe as nuclear waste.’ All the elaborate security theater we’ve been doing ended up putting anti-vaxxers in charge of the FDA.”
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