A COVID vaccine you can make at home? Scientists are trying it

The Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, or RaDVaC, is a group of scientists working on an open-source, low-tech COVID-19 vaccine that costs pennies per dose; but it isn’t yet proven to work, and it doesn’t have a green light from regulators.

For the millions of people around the world who don’t have access to hard-to-get Covid-19 vaccines, a group of Boston-area scientists has a potential solution. And it’s literally a solution, one that you snort in hopes of warding off the deadly virus. The group is called the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, or RaDVaC, and their vaccine is so easy to make that its chief scientist, Preston Estep, said we could whip it up in my kitchen. So we did. Drawbacks: The vaccine isn’t proven to work, and it doesn’t have regulatory authorization. It also hasn’t gone through huge, lengthy, costly clinical trials like those undertaken by Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc., AstraZeneca Plc and Johnson & Johnson. The main testing ground for the vaccine is RaDVaC’s scientists themselves and other colleagues like Harvard Medical School’s George Church, who believe the project has merit.