Buck’s body made antibodies against several types of the virus after drinking the beer and he suffered no ill effects, he and his brother Andrew Buck reported December 17 at the data sharing platform Zenodo.org, along with colleagues from NIH and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Andrew and other family members have also consumed the beer with no ill effects, he says. The Buck brothers posted a method for making vaccine beer December 17 at Zenodo.org. Chris Buck announced both publications in his blog Viruses Must Die on the online publishing platform Substack, but neither has been peer-reviewed by other scientists.
A second ethics committee at the NIH objected to Buck posting the manuscripts to the preprint server bioRxiv.org because of the self-experiment. Buck wrote a rebuttal to the committee’s comments but was loathe to wait for its blessing before sharing the data. “The bureaucracy is inhibiting the science, and that’s unacceptable to me,” he says. “One week of people dying from not knowing about this is not trivial.”
Ah, misses the chance to call it beer-reviewed…
“The bureaucracy is inhibiting the science, and that’s unacceptable to me,”
There are a lot of genuinely good natured and ambitious people in this world. And the NIH is run by a fucking clown college, atm. So I respect this guy’s vibe.
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. And - if anything - this kind of recklessness inhibits plans for distribution at-scale for any kind of reputable provider.
The second order consequence of this decision isn’t good for mass distribution. It invites this kind of technology (or, at least, the pastiche) to be picked up by huskters and con-artists.
“One week of people dying from not knowing about this is not trivial.”
Statements like this reek of quackery. Even if he’s legit, he’s talking like someone more interested in marketing his medicine than verifying its efficacy.
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?
He’s a professional virologist with the NIH.
Then he should definitely know better and know why what he’s doing will ruin any chance he has of rapid certification.
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.
Marshall won a nobel prize despite self-administration. And he’s a popular example in large part because he’s one of the last of note. Setting aside the dangers of self-experimentation, there’s a host of issues ranging from the individual psychological (doctors are as vulnerable to sunk-cost fallacy as anyone) to broader problems of replication issues (publishing one-off successes/failures can lead to misinformation regarding the viability of a given therapy).
As a counter-example, about ten years ago there was a huge media fixation on Reservatrol, stemming in part from scientists involved in the study boasting that they self administered to amazing effect. Consequently, the vaunted claims of the pharmaceutical - as an anti-aging drug and neuro-protectant - failed to bare out in practice. But it became a popular OTC remedy pushed by the Alternative Medicine folks.
Ginseng, Garlic, St. John’s Wort, and Acai Berries underwent the same fad promotions. Dr. Oz, most prominently, made a career of pushing various alternative supplements and remedies that he claimed he personally used or he used on celebrity guests and show hosts to great effect.
Then he should definitely know better and know why what he’s doing will ruin any chance he has of rapid certification.
Asking naively: In what way would this self-experiment have bearing on later trials done by other parties?
Setting aside the dangers of self-experimentation, there’s a host of issues ranging from the individual psychological (doctors are as vulnerable to sunk-cost fallacy as anyone) to broader problems of replication issues (publishing one-off successes/failures can lead to misinformation regarding the viability of a given therapy).
IMO the main issue I saw in this case was administering to family members, to put my cards on the table, but I think given the risk profile, it was acceptable in context if they were well-informed and had an epipen handy.
All research involves risk, and a key pillar of bioethics is the requirement of informed consent. Generally speaking, no one is better informed than a principal investigator to give that consent, and no one has better-aligned incentives to ensure safety.
I also think any doing serious biomed research is well-educated enough to understand standards of evidence and treat small-N case studies for what they are.
Ginseng, Garlic, St. John’s Wort, and Acai Berries underwent the same fad promotions.
This is going too far in my book; wishful thinking is the problem here, not self-experimentation in a clinical context. I agree these supplements are overhyped, but do you really think we should be barring people from trying out garlic and reporting what they experience?
The ethical issue in the case of grifter supplements is trying to financially profit from a contrived narrative, not the inherent process of trying things on a small scale and reporting those findings.
I appreciate that there are ethics boards holding scientists to standards, but sometimes (not usually, I know – only in very specific cases!) it takes someone with initiative to “just do it”. And the guy isn’t some crank, he’s a virologist who’s discovered multiple viruses. Good for him, I say.
A research ethics committee at the National Institutes of Health told Buck he couldn’t experiment on himself by drinking the beer.
Buck says the committee has the right to determine what he can and can’t do at work but can’t govern what he does in his private life. So today he is Chef Gusteau, the founder and sole employee of Gusteau Research Corporation, a nonprofit organization Buck established so he could make and drink his vaccine beer as a private citizen.
This is no different IMO from the scientist who proved that H.Pylori causes a common form of stomache ulcer.
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.
But he did it on personal time, with personal resources, under the purview of a non-profit totally unrelated to his employer. He didn’t use their name/brand, so there’s no defamation here either is there?
I understand the fear of some rogue ‘mad scientist’ doing something stupid but this really doesn’t seem to be that situation here.
Running a study that’s unethical and scientifically rigorous and pushing the results, is a mark of a bad scientist.
This is rather similar to how the “vaccines cause autism” myth started.
Running a study that’s unethical
You’re assuming the conclusion though – that it’s unethical. The argument here is that he tested it on himself specifically in order not to endanger others – as that would be unethical.
If, as some would hope, other scientists try to reproduce the results then it’ll get corroboration, or be shot down.
If the brews contain only safe test viruses, it should ethically be a safe experiment. Test for antibodies to the innocuous viruses and thee mechanism is proven or disproven.
If this works then it’s great news. A big part of vaccine hesitancy is literally just people being afraid of needles. So a needle free vaccine would increase uptake of vaccines.
Tell that to the asshats who are actively removing fluoride from water sources because of whatever unfounded conspiracy theory some dumbass podcaster espoused last week.
They might be beyond reach, but there is still a very large cohort of people who are not full-blown anti-vaxxers but still vaccine hesitant
You’re right! And that’s a valid point to make.
I only meant to point out that it’s not a silver bullet, and there are people who will still willfully try to get rid of it.
im skeptical about the hole thing but also a needlephobe. Heck I hate beer but it it allowed me to avoid a little prick im onboard.
When my dad was a boy, he got the polio vaccine in the form of a sugar cube.
I wonder why they stopped doing that. Seems like a much more kid-friendly way to administer a vaccine
Because the the oral vaccine (in most cases) is a live vaccine that could cause a rare vaccine-associated polio. And the modern IPV can be administered along other intramuscular injected vaccines.
It is still highly effective and played a central role in eradication of the virus. It enabled mass immunisation efforts and also protected unvaccinated family members through vaccine viruses transmitted the fecal-oral route.
It’s still in use in poor countries with endemic polio.
Listen here you little shit, shut up about 6-7 and drink your vaccine.
@pelespirit I had to click on this to see if was just a dad joke. I’m glad it’s not (?)
It’s a pretty awesome guy thing to do, I get why you thought that.
