Science

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.”