The Vaccine Revolution Will Now Be Televised

Vaccine beer: coming soon to a brewery near you

Breaching the glacial wall

I got my annual flu and covid vaccines a few months back. I’m 55, so the pharmacist insisted that I lie to him about having a “risk factor” before he could administer me the routine covid shot. I wanted to tell him the honest truth: my risk factor is that I have a really bad case of the RFKJ-is-incompetent brainworm that’s going around. But that probably wouldn’t have gotten me the life-saving medicine President Trump and I both know we need.

But let’s not dwell on political grievances! This post is about a brighter future. This week, our group posted breakthrough findings showing that ordinary brewer’s yeast can easily be turned into food-grade vaccines. And by “easily” I mean I literally conducted the entire experiment on an ordinary household budget in my own home kitchen. Vaccines can be delivered in the form of food! It means the new category of vaccines can be regulated as food — and people can choose for themselves whether to try them. Some additional detail on the discovery is here.

I’ve spent the past 15+ years working to develop a traditional injection vaccine targeting a group of viruses you’ve probably never heard of, called polyomaviruses1. They cause serious problems, including an incredibly painful bladder condition that often affects people who get bone marrow transplants. On a visit to a pediatric transplant hospital about a decade ago, my host told me they had to install soundproofing in the wards, because sometimes the bladder pain makes the kids scream so loud at night it wakes everybody up. I gracefully assimilated the upsetting knowledge. Then when I got back to my hotel room I put my face in my hands and broke into heaving sobs. If the mental image of children wailing in agony isn’t bad enough, I also felt acutely overwhelmed by the fact that I know how to solve this goddamn problem — but there’s a glacial wall of license-wrangling, technical development, and impenetrable regulatory bureaucracy between me and the desperate families literally screaming for my help. They were tears of frustration.

Posting the edible vaccine papers gives me tears of relief. I know how to breach the glacial wall.

I’m a long-time Asimov fan, so I of course watched the AppleTV adaptation of Foundation. The thought that has begun creeping into my imagination is that these food-based vaccine approaches are so simple the information can theoretically survive a civilizational collapse. People living in caves could just about practice this art! The simple knowledge that beer can be a vaccine could shorten a dark age. Meantime, fewer children screaming in agony would also be pretty nice.

Scientific preprints (Zenodo)

“An Edible Polyomavirus Vaccine” Soleymani, Tavassoli, et al.

“Vaccine Beer: A Personal Healthcare Report” Buck & Buck

Media coverage

•My hat is off to Science News’ brilliant Tina Saey. Her balanced coverage of the controversies in this strange new market space is truly excellent.

•I wouldn’t have believed that this story could be told in seven minutes, but the friendly team at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s evening show As It Happens did so very deftly (vaccine beer story starts at minute 16:25)

•Hats off to The Times of London’s Will Pavia — it takes great skill to weave a little playfulness into his high-accuracy coverage of this complicated science.

•Succinct (and entertaining) coverage from Futurism. Couple other stories here.

•The vaccine science we’ve been developing is an uplifting story of international cooperation, with co-authors hailing from Iran, Lithuania, Ghana, and Mexico. My ancestry is half English and half German. So I guess that’s where my beer love comes from.

•Dan Elton’s stack, More is Different, is a model example for the idea that all scientists should maintain a science blog. Long live peer-to-peer review!

•Ronald Bailey’s coverage in Reason Magazine insightfully highlights my view that competitive free markets can be a powerful force for human liberation.

•This Progress, Potential, and Possibilities appearance was a fun conversation.

•On February 4, I was placed on “non-adverse” paid administrative leave. As of May 5, I have received no communications from my employer about when the leave might end. Sort of akin to these stories. Fortunately for me, my kitchen is now a tricked-out molecular biology lab. I’m treating it like a sabbatical.

Song of the day:

You will now be able to stay home, brother

And make beer during commercials, because

The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat

The revolution will be live

Mashup of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 masterpiece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

[embed]

[1]Disclosure: under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, a fraction of the licensing royalties for the traditional injection vaccine effort go directly into my personal bank account. In my view, the Bayh-Dole Act should be repealed — but until that happens there’s enough money flowing into my pockets that a reasonable observer could wonder whether it’s tempering my thinking on this stuff. On the other hand, if there were nothing but cartoon dollar signs in my eyes I probably wouldn’t be telling you how to make free vaccine beer in your kitchen.