A vaccine in a beer?

 

Apparently that's more than just a theoretical idea.

Chris Buck stands barefoot in his kitchen holding a glass bottle of unfiltered Lithuanian farmhouse ale. He swirls the bottle gently to stir up a fingerbreadth blanket of yeast and pours the turbulent beer into a glass mug.

Buck raises the mug and sips. “Cloudy beer. Delightful!”

He has just consumed what may be the world’s first vaccine delivered in a beer. It could be the first small sip toward making vaccines more palatable and accessible to people around the world. Or it could fuel concerns about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Or the idea may go nowhere. No matter the outcome, the story of Buck’s unconventional approach illustrates the legal, ethical, moral, scientific and social challenges involved in developing potentially lifesaving vaccines.

There's much more at the link - too much to summarize here.  I highly recommend clicking over there and reading the article for yourself.

This is both exciting and worrying.  It's exciting, in that it may offer a way to distribute important vaccines in a timely and palatable way without needing medical facilities or personnel to do so.  On the other hand, it's worrying in that a vaccine that's more politically correct than medically necessary (for example, the infamous COVID MRNA vaccines) could be foisted upon us without any warning or opportunity to avoid ingesting it.  The consequences might be disastrous, but we wouldn't know about that until it was too late to avoid them.

This isn't the first attempt to devise ways to distribute vaccines through our food supply.  Remember the vaccine-loaded salads issue a few years ago?  That posed exactly the same conundrum.  One wonders what's next - and whether or not we'll be told about it before it's used, so that we can make our own choices about what we want in our bodies.  If the bureaucrats have their way, I daresay we won't.

Peter