A Toast to Vaccine Beer

This stuff could save the world

I have a flashbulb memory of seeing the initial bar graph on Amin’s computer screen. The mice Safoura fed with vaccine yeast were mounting a response! Vaccines can be food! This changes everything! I remember feeling a little dizzy from the eureka moment.

Tina Saey’s elegant reporting in Science News shows that perception of the eureka is still eluding some of my colleagues. I have no hard feelings about the controversy - it’s a respectable difference of scientific opinion on the quaking landscape of a surprising paradigm shift. I’ve been doing vaccine research for 30 years, and I myself couldn’t see the promised land until very recently¹.

The basic problem for vaccine scientists has been our collective failure to understand the anti-vaxxer viewpoint. Our response for the past half century has been to imagine that we can rebuild public trust in vaccines with displays of increasingly stringent FDA approval standards. This approach backfired. Imagine if I set out to do safety testing on a banana, and I dressed up in a hazmat suit and handled the banana with tongs. You wouldn’t think, “Wow, Chris sure is thorough with this banana safety testing” - you’d think “Wow, it looks like bananas might be about as safe as nuclear waste.” All the elaborate security theater we’ve been doing ended up putting anti-vaxxers in charge of the FDA. High five, vaccine community!

Of course, the FDA drug approval track isn’t just about safety - the main purpose of the approval system is to document that the drug works for its intended medical purpose. I can’t sell you a banana with the unapproved label claim that it will prevent strokes and reduce the risk of kidney stones. It’s plausible that the potassium in a banana might have salutary health effects, but I can’t make a conclusive claim about it unless it has FDA drug approval. On the other hand, I can still sell you the banana as a consumer product that meets federal food safety standards. It’s only illegal to tell you the banana is a safe and effective drug.

I know and love some deeply committed anti-vaxxers, and my openminded debates with them have helped me see that distrust of Big Pharma is at the center of their concerns. That’s fine! I don’t trust Big Pharma either! I would feel much better if Big Pharma’s medical claims were being evaluated by a neutral third party - as opposed to the system we have now, where Big Pharma self-tests its own products under the expensive and time-consuming security theater micromanagement of a potentially corruptible government agency. I also object to the fact that the reward on the other side of the regulatory wall is a de facto product monopoly. This is not what capitalism looks like. A capitalist system would use product reviews and third-party testing, like we have for practically all other categories of consumer goods.

This is why the fact that vaccines can be food is so earthshaking. We suddenly have a new path where we can lawfully put away the hazmat suit and just eat the damn banana. And Consumer Reports, Consumer Lab, and America’s Test Kitchen can help us figure out the best bananas.

One issue my brother and I wrestled with while we were developing vaccine yeast was whether the word “vaccine” is a self-contained claim of medical efficacy. In this regard, the anti-vaxxers have been doing us a weird upside-down favor with their claims that some vaccines are ineffective. Another way of thinking about it is to imagine setting up a Phase 1 safety trial under FDA guidance. I would be required to tell trial volunteers that the goal is to investigate the safety and possible efficacy of a new vaccine product. I wouldn’t be allowed to tell the volunteers they’re drinking Happy Funtimes Green Yeast and decline to mention the possible vaccine effects. In short, the word vaccine by itself isn’t an efficacy claim - it’s an expression of a possible health effect the food might plausibly have. Sometimes a banana is just a banana.

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Song of the day:

1. A friend opined that opening with an MLK quote seemed a little grandiose for a science blog. But the truth is I consider King one of the top few greatest thinkers in all of human history - and I often refer to his sermons and speeches in times of struggle. So with that in mind, here’s why I chose the term “promised land.”

“I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

This was King’s last speech. He knew he might be murdered for his convictions. I’m nowhere near as brave as all that, but it helps put things in perspective. Getting fired for my convictions would obviously be trivial compared to the stakes King was forced to reckon with.