It's the Stockton rush playbook.

"Big science wants to hold me back because I'm an INNOVATOR and definitely not because there are real and present safety concerns."

There's a lot of questions to be answered here but I feel like this could potentially be a pretty cool thing

He's created a strain of yeast that seems like it could function as an oral vaccine

You could just filter off the beer and eat the yeast, or maybe put it into pills or something, or purify it into a normal injectable vaccine

But there's a lot of people out there who are skeptical of pills and afraid of needles, or who just won't want to eat powdered yeast

But a lot of those same people will happily drink a beer.

It could also be a way towards sort of decentralizing vaccine production. Imagine he starts selling little packets of dry vaccine yeast for people to brew beer with. Yeast is pretty forgiving in its storage requirements, keep it in its little sealed envelope and keep it reasonably dry, and it should be good for a couple years. You can ship that around the world without much fuss.

And people all over the world know how to brew beer. Get that packet of yeast into the local hooch-maker's hands anywhere in the world, and they can turn it into a bunch of 1-pint vaccine doses in a week or two. No particularly special equipment or distribution networks needed, and vaccine distribution becomes as easy as hosting a kegger.

And if they're able to reclaim some of that yeast to brew another batch, you've potentially even set them up for long-term vaccine beer production.

You might also be better able to convince people who might otherwise be skeptical about taking a traditional vaccine to just drink a beer. It's not something scary like a needle, or weird and unnatural like a pill, it's "just" a beer.

And you can focus your efforts a bit more on who you need to convince about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. You don't need to convince a whole village to trust vaccines, you just need to convince the local brewer that the people already trust, and then you can piggyback off that existing trust.

Hell, I'm pro vaccine, but I know I'd probably be a little more proactive about getting mine if it meant I got to go have a couple beers.

Again, there's a lot of questions that need to be answered, not the least of which are the basic safety and effectiveness of this

There's also informed consent, making sure that the people drinking the beer understand that the beer is a bit more than just a beer, and the risks of alcohol (although if this is an effective delivery system, I think it's likely that those risks are well-outweighed by the benefits of vaccines)

I definitely think it's something worth exploring.

Reading that article, there’s nothing in there that even hints at money being a motive.

It doesn't really say what the alcohol content is. 0.1% is still an alcoholic beverage. But good luck getting drunk.

Though I'm not sure if it's really a beer or just a mead. Making actual beer is a very complex process. Mead on the other hand is so simple anyone can do it.

They're afraid of anything they don't understand. Which is a fucking lot.

Thank Dr. Tina Hesman Saey, and the publisher for valuing and employing skilled humans and not Copilot.

it had me at the headline tbh

I'm going to sneak that on the toast of every Aussie vaccine skeptic

I don't know what you consider the "whole official process" but it exists for good reasons.

Yeast-based vaccines seem cool, and ingestion based vaccines rather than injection increases the availability, but also counterfits. But as someone said in the article. You cannot draw conclusions from two test subjects.

Does it make pregnant women miscarry? Does it make them sterrile? How does it affect those with different blood types? how does it interact with other types of commonly taken medications? Or even food for that matter.

Don't you think it would be good to know those things ahead of time? Because that's what the "whole official process" is about.

None of this is new.

You've got your head on straight, the last thing we need right now is sensationalist rhetoric and poor scientific ethics. It's a fun idea and he makes some good points, but this isn't how a serious person advocates for serious work.

But self-experimentation is a huge taboo in bio-ethics for a litany of reasons. If this guy was a proper professional, he’d know that.

He’s a professional virologist with the NIH.

Speaking from my own professional lens, I think the consensus around self-experimentation in biomed is way less black and white than you’re making it out to be. E.g., Dr. Barry Marshall famously won a nobel prize for self administering H. Pylori.

What are your particular scruples in this case, if you don’t mind me asking?

This is no different IMO from the scientist who proved that H.Pylori causes a common form of stomache ulcer.

Funny how you only hear about the successful self-experiments.

Any biomedical experiment with an N=1 is meaningless. Buck should know this. Many self-experimenters proved drugs "safe" only to have others repeat the experiment and die.

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis sought to prove body fluids cause sepsis on himself. He was right, and he died of sepsis. In your face, doubters!

In 1936, Edwin Katskee took a very large dose of cocaine. He attempted to write notes on his office wall, but these became increasingly illegible as the experiment proceeded. Katskee was found dead the next morning.

Around 1886, Nicholas Senn pumped nearly six litres of hydrogen through his anus. Senn used a rubber balloon holding four US gallons connected to a rubber tube inserted in the anus. An assistant sealed the tube by squeezing the anus against it. The hydrogen was inserted by squeezing the balloon while monitoring the pressure on a manometer. The experiment was to detect intestinal leaks by lighting the hydrogen gas. We don't understand the pure Musk-like genius here.

Daniel Alcides Carrión described the disease in the course of what proved to be a fatal experiment upon himself in 1885, in order to demonstrate definitively the cause of the illness. He was inoculated by close friends with blood which had been taken from a wart of a 14-year-old patient. Carrión's aim was to prove a link between the acute blood stage of Oroya fever with that of the later chronic form of the disease, called verruga peruana, typified by numerous red, wart-like dermal nodules.

Jesse William Lazear (May 2, 1866 – September 25, 1900) was an American physician. In 1900, he deliberately allowed a mosquito to bite him to test the hypothesis that mosquitoes were the vector for yellow fever transmission. He contracted the disease but did not recover and died on September 25, 1900.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine

The result is cool, assuming it’s real, but he did not go about this in a scientific way, so the “published” results are basically junk, and it doesn’t reflect well on him as a scientist, and it sounds like it might lose him his job, for good reason IMO.