this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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There's a lot of questions to be answered here but I feel like this could potentially be a pretty cool thing
He's created a strain of yeast that seems like it could function as an oral vaccine
You could just filter off the beer and eat the yeast, or maybe put it into pills or something, or purify it into a normal injectable vaccine
But there's a lot of people out there who are skeptical of pills and afraid of needles, or who just won't want to eat powdered yeast
But a lot of those same people will happily drink a beer.
It could also be a way towards sort of decentralizing vaccine production. Imagine he starts selling little packets of dry vaccine yeast for people to brew beer with. Yeast is pretty forgiving in its storage requirements, keep it in its little sealed envelope and keep it reasonably dry, and it should be good for a couple years. You can ship that around the world without much fuss.
And people all over the world know how to brew beer. Get that packet of yeast into the local hooch-maker's hands anywhere in the world, and they can turn it into a bunch of 1-pint vaccine doses in a week or two. No particularly special equipment or distribution networks needed, and vaccine distribution becomes as easy as hosting a kegger.
And if they're able to reclaim some of that yeast to brew another batch, you've potentially even set them up for long-term vaccine beer production.
You might also be better able to convince people who might otherwise be skeptical about taking a traditional vaccine to just drink a beer. It's not something scary like a needle, or weird and unnatural like a pill, it's "just" a beer.
And you can focus your efforts a bit more on who you need to convince about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. You don't need to convince a whole village to trust vaccines, you just need to convince the local brewer that the people already trust, and then you can piggyback off that existing trust.
Hell, I'm pro vaccine, but I know I'd probably be a little more proactive about getting mine if it meant I got to go have a couple beers.
Again, there's a lot of questions that need to be answered, not the least of which are the basic safety and effectiveness of this
There's also informed consent, making sure that the people drinking the beer understand that the beer is a bit more than just a beer, and the risks of alcohol (although if this is an effective delivery system, I think it's likely that those risks are well-outweighed by the benefits of vaccines)
I definitely think it's something worth exploring.
Yeah, getting yeast to manufacture vaccines would go a long way to making them accessible. Especially if successive generations also produce the vaccine. Probably lots of testing left to do and definitely better watch out in case it disrupts vaccine makers profits. I really hate corporate feudalism
The difficulty I see here is that it took the yeast not very long to mutate a beneficial effect, but it could just as quickly mutate away from that and even mutate something harmful.
The biggest cost factor for classical pharma is QA. Both in the form of certifications before release and in the form of regular QA during production.
So skipping QA can of course bring the cost down massively, but with the cost of making a potentially very dangerous product.
It's possible I missed it, but I didn't see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.
Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.
As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it's a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. It's certainly worth being cautious about, and I'm certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it's probably a pretty low likelihood.
The reason why I thought about harmful mutations in this context is because this strain of yeast has some kind of property that activates the immune system, otherwise the whole concept wouldn't work.
That's not something regular yeast does, so for regular yeast to evolve something like that, that's a major step in evolution that doesn't happen quickly.
But modifying the immune system activating payload is much less difficult.
Due to the Hoskins effect, it's possible that an immune system trained for a "somewhat wrong" pathogen can perform worse than one that hasn't seen that kind of pathogen at all before. So if the payload of the yeast mutates, it can "mistrain" the immune system so that it then performs worse on the real-life pathogen.
That seems unlikely. The entire way it works is the yeast produces proteins that "look" like a virus to the immune system, causing a immune response. However that's the only part of of the virus in the yeast, there's nothing else that completes the virus. It's like... a steering wheel without a car, no matter how hard I mime swerving to run over a pedestrian nothing's gonna happen, because there is no car.
If the viral protein mutated it'd either A) still be recognized as a viral protein and generate immunity for a virus that doesn't exist, or B) generate a non-functional protein that the body would simply digest.
The version A) is a big issue actually, thanks to the Hoskins effect.
That means that if the immune system is trained for a slightly wrong type of pathogen, it might have a worse immune response to the actual pathogen at hand than if it wasn't trained at all.
So if that viral protein would mutate a bit, so that it's still recognized as viral protein by the immune system, it might cause the immune response to the actual virus to be worse instead of improving it.
Post-brewed yeast you say..
I need to get this to the Australian science community for Vegemite vaccines asap!
This is just stupid. The reason why there are no vaccine pills is because the antigens would not survive the harsh degradation environment of the digestive tract. Real scientist have been trying to make oral vaccines since the 60s.
There already are oral vaccines? There's one for rabies that's been airdropped across the US for years now... however to be fair that one is a live attenuated virus.
Edit and FTA:
In this case it's my understanding that they're using the yeast to "smuggle" the viral proteins through the stomach acid, and then when the yeast is digested in the intestines the body is exposed to the added viral proteins. So since you need live yeast you can have vaccine beer, but not vaccine bread.
It's funny that you specifically mentioned the '60s, because back then they were pretty routinely administering the oral polio vaccine on a sugar cube for school children
That's how my dad got it back then