Innovation

This Cancer Researcher Home-Brewed a Beer That Works as a Vaccine

And he's publishing the process so you can do it too.

Ronald Bailey | From the April 2026 issue

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(Christopher Buck)

Christopher Buck is fermenting a vaccine in his kitchen. You can too.

Specifically, Buck brews and quaffs a hazy beer that induces immunity against the BK virus, also known as human polyomavirus. Buck argues that you have the right to home-brew vaccines as a way to get around the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) yearslong vaccine approval process.

Buck joins the pantheon of pioneering
vaccine self-experimenters. Among them are French physician and Nobel Prize winner Charles Jules Henri Nicolle, who used crushed lice to inoculate himself against typhus; Jonas Salk, who injected himself with his own polio vaccine; and Albert Sabin, who ingested his oral polio vaccine. In 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of researchers associated with Harvard launched the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative. They developed and self-administered a do-it-yourself nasal vaccine months before commercial vaccines against the coronavirus became available. They made their DIY recipe for the COVID-19 vaccine available to anyone.

Buck's day........

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