Scientists Are Sharing A DIY COVID-19 Vaccine Under A Creative Commons License
Image via Shutterstock
A team of citizen scientists associated with the Harvard Medical School have created a coronavirus vaccine that can be assembled and administered on your own. They have launched a nonprofit site, RaDVac, releasing their findings under a Creative Commons License.
Though the researchers claim to have self-administered the vaccine, it has not been approved or reviewed by the US Food and Drug Administration.
The website details that “a commercial vaccine won’t arrive until late 2020 or easy 2021 if all goes well.” Therefore, they have taken it upon themselves to develop a version that can be produced without extensive laboratory equipment.
The vaccine is concocted through a strenuous process with five commercially available ingredients, such as epitope peptides, chitosan, sodium triphosphate, sodium chloride, and water.
“Our mission is rapid development, testing, and public sharing of vaccine recipes that are simple enough to be produced and administered by individual citizen scientists,” the group wrote on the website.
The scientists utilized their biomedical research to develop SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, which they are now testing on themselves. They hope to connect with “other citizen scientists” to further advance their research through the sharing “of ideas, data, and best practices.”
The formula has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, which indicates that “you are free to Share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format), and Adapt (fork, alter, and build upon) the material for any purpose.”
After assembling the vaccine, it can be self-administered via an intranasal spray. However, results will likely be more varied and there isn’t any safety guaranteed for trying out the vaccine.
Hello, world!
— RaDVaC (@RADVACproject) July 4, 2020
[via Vice, cover image via Shutterstock]
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