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Food flavourings: how waste products are used to create your favourite taste
by Anna Sandner
Why did this virologist brew a «vaccine beer»?
16.3.2026
Translation: Katherine Martin
A virologist from the US has created a beer that supposedly protects against a dangerous virus. While the idea may sound like a booze-fuelled scheme, it’s actually a sound act of protest against a licensing system that, in his view, moves agonisingly slowly. Now, his self-experiment has landed him in hot water.
What if, instead of getting a jab in the arm to protect yourself against a dangerous pathogen, you could simply drink a cold pint? This may sound whacky, but it’s actually a genuine idea put forward by virologist Chris Buck from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Buck, however, didn’t just stop at the theory phase. Working alongside his brother Andrew, he turned his idea into a reality by brewing an experimental antiviral beer.
The bureaucratic wall
Why would an experienced researcher go to such extreme lengths? In a nutshell, out of frustration. Buck’s been working on vaccines against BK polyomaviruses for more than 15 years. Many people carry these viruses, usually without realising it. However, they can be dangerous for people with severely weakened immune systems, especially after organ transplants. In addition, they can cause serious damage to transplanted organs.
Buck has been railing against the lengthy, expensive and grindingly slow bureaucratic process that traditional vaccines often need to go through in order to be developed. Since vaccines are administered to healthy individuals, large clinical trials and rigorous safety tests are essential. For someone like Buck, however, this system feels like a glacier wall; huge, cold and immovable.
On top of that, he has a personal reason for doing what he’s doing. In the US, HPV vaccines initially weren’t given to adult males. After a friend of Buck’s reportedly didn’t receive the vaccine, he later died of a cancer linked to HPV. To Buck, it was clear the system was too rigid, too slow and excluded people in urgent need of protection. With this in mind, he went looking for a loophole.
Yeast as a Trojan horse
As it turned out, the loophole led him towards brewing beer. Buck experimented with standard brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, then modified it to produce virus-like particles. These were essentially the virus’s empty shell – an entity the immune system sees as an enemy, although it doesn’t contain any infectious genetic material. The aim? For the body to learn to produce antibodies without a real infection developing.
In his initial experiments, Buck discovered that the yeast had to be alive on arrival in the digestive tract in order to trigger an immune response. Since live yeast is usually found in unfiltered beer, the idea of «vaccine beer» was born. Buck says people who don’t drink alcohol can simply pour away the beer and eat the sediment, i.e. the pure yeast, with a spoon.
Source: Christopher B. Buck/Zenodo
The food trick: a legal stunt
Now, here comes the stroke of genius – or the big scandal, depending on who you ask. Buck tried to exploit a regulatory loophole created by the US authorities. If a substance is injected, the US usually considers it a drug or biological product. As a result, it’s subject to a complex approvals process. If, on the other hand, it’s drunk or eaten, and based on a substance such as brewer’s yeast, it might be considered closer to a dietary supplement. However, things aren’t quite that simple. Even in the US, supplements aren’t allowed to be advertised as being vaccine-like or able to prevent diseases.
To put his strategy into practice, Buck founded a non-profit company and had the modified yeast sold on a minimal scale. He also posted his methodology and data on Zenodo, an online platform for scientific publications.
In the EU, it’d be virtually impossible to pull off a move like this. A product marketed as a vaccine or as protecting against infection in EU countries wouldn’t pass as a foodstuff or supplement. Instead, it’d be examined under the laws that govern pharmaceuticals. In Switzerland, products like these are also subject to strict regulatory hurdles. Plus, genetically modified organisms need to meet additional requirements.
A self-experiment with consequences
But how effective is the vaccine beer in real life? Since the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) ethics committee strictly forbade Buck’s experiment, he brewed and drank his beer as a private individual at home. After doing so, he actually did end up developing antibodies against several BK subtypes. Scientifically speaking, self-experiments like this don’t constitute reliable proof of efficacy.
Even so, Buck’s story has prodded one of modern medicine’s sore spots. Namely, the difficult balance between achieving essential safety through strict state regulation and the urgent need to bring life-saving innovations to patients quickly. While it’s questionable that Buck’s vaccine beer will ever become a genuine alternative to conventional jabs, it’s certainly triggered a long overdue discussion.
Header image: Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels
Anna Sandner
Senior Editor
Anna.Sandner@galaxus.deScience editor and biologist. I love animals and am fascinated by plants, their abilities and everything you can do with them. That's why my favourite place is always the outdoors - somewhere in nature, preferably in my wild garden.
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