Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
A researcher at the National Cancer Institute has developed a vaccine against human polyomavirus and delivered it in the form of a hefeweizen, which he brewed in his kitchen and drank over the course of four days, because apparently this is how science is done now under the Trump/RFK Jr administration.
Christopher Buck is credited with discovering four of the thirteen polyomaviruses known to infect humans, which is the kind of résumé line that normally buys you a laboratory and a parking spot, not a homebrew fermenter and a novel legal theory. But Buck has both. He engineered brewer’s yeast to manufacture the protein shell of the BK virus, mixed it into a Flash Hefeweizen kit with Saphir hop pellets, and consumed the result in what he describes as a series of medically significant pints.
The glorious taste of polyomavirus. (Christopher Buck)
Buck reports that after his initial four-day drinking regimen, followed by two five-day booster flights over subsequent months, his blood tests showed antibodies against several strains of the BK polyomavirus. He also reported no adverse effects. He also reported, separately but with apparent pride, that “it was one of the best homebrews I ever made.” These observations appeared in the same paper, by the way.
In healthy people, polyomavirus infection is about as remarkable as owning a pair of shoes. Roughly 90 percent of humans have antibodies by age ten. The virus becomes dangerous primarily in organ transplant patients whose immune systems have been deliberately suppressed, at which point it reactivates and starts doing the one thing you’d expect a virus named “many tumors” would do. Buck’s day job involves preventing this. His evening job, apparently, involves preventing it with a slight buzz with better mouthfeel.
Buck’s legal reasoning for why this is all perfectly fine is that since his yeast-based product is consumed as food, and the ingredients already exist in the food supply, and nothing is marketed as a therapy, the FDA’s vaccine regulatory framework simply does not apply. He describes his ingredients as meeting the FDA definition of “generally regarded as safe,” which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting when what you’re generally regarding as safe is a genetically engineered immunological wheat beer.
To ensure that nobody mistakes his vaccine beer for official government work, Buck established the Gusteau Research Corporation, a nonprofit where he is the sole employee. His brother founded a separate entity called Remy LLC to sell food-grade engineered yeast. Both are named after characters from Ratatouille. The film’s motto, “Anyone can cook,” serves as the project’s guiding philosophy, which is either inspiring or terrifying depending on how you feel about applying Pixar logic to immunology.
Buck is not operating in a vacuum. He joins a long tradition of scientists who tested vaccines on themselves, including Jonas Salk, who injected his own polio vaccine, and Albert Sabin, who drank his. In 2020, a group of Harvard-affiliated researchers developed and self-administered a DIY nasal COVID-19 vaccine months before commercial versions existed and published the recipe online. Buck’s innovation is mostly one of presentation: previous self-experimenters used needles and nasal sprays. Buck uses a pint glass.
He is now calling on fellow scientists to explore whether his approach can be extended to bird flu and emerging COVID-19 variants, which is the kind of sentence that reads very differently depending on whether you picture it coming from a federally regulated laboratory or some guy’s garage. Buck acknowledges the current stupid political climate around vaccines, noting that crackpot government officials have begun restricting access, and argues that food-based vaccines could return “autonomous decision-making authority” to individual Americans. The path forward, as he sees it, is one in which “free market forces, combined with standard scientific scrutiny,” replace regulatory oversight.
The FDA has not yet commented, possibly because no one there has figured out whether or not the ATF should be involved as well.
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