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?
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