German physicians discovered news reports about a guy under investigation for obtaining several coronavirus vaccinations without a valid medical reason two years ago.
Then there was a rush of conjecture regarding his whereabouts. It turned out that authorities were investigating if the reason he was receiving so many extra doses was a plot to gather stamped immunization cards, which he might then resell to individuals seeking to evade vaccination laws.
However, the individual was viewed by the doctors as an aberration in medicine because he had disregarded advice from authorities and agreed to serve as a test subject for determining the upper bounds of an immune response. They requested last year that the prosecutors looking into his vaccination expenditure forward this request: Would he be interested in participating in a study?
The man consented after prosecutors concluded their fraud probe without filing any criminal charges.
The 62-year-old man had gotten 215 doses of the coronavirus vaccine by the time the doctors visited him, according to their report. Disregarding their requests to halt, he went on to take two more injections in the ensuing months, increasing his immune reserve to 217 doses total—eight distinct Covid vaccine types—over a two-and-a-half-year period.
The physicians, under the direction of Dr. Kilian Schober, an immunologist at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in the German state of Bavaria, spent months examining him. This week, they published their results in the medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
It seems that the man had never contracted the coronavirus. There were no adverse effects noted by him. Most intriguingly to the researchers, he had a far greater repertoire of immune cells and antibodies than the average vaccinated individual, even if the effectiveness of those immune responses stayed about the same.
Even the 217th shot, the researchers discovered, improved the man’s immunological response. Additionally, they said they saw no such decline in responses, while closely monitoring him for any indications of a gradual weakening of his immune responses over time—an undesirable form of immunological tolerance that can occasionally arise during protracted viral infections.
According to Dr. Schober, “This shows how robust the immune system’s response is to such repetitive immunization.” “A chronic infection poses a far greater threat to the immune system than even 200 vaccinations.”
The man’s origins were identified by the researchers as Magdeburg, a central German city, but they did not provide any further details, stating that his motivations for the vaccination frenzy were personal.
The researchers reported that over nine months, the prosecution had gathered proof of 130 vaccines. In June 2021, the man received his first vaccine, a Johnson & Johnson jab. The majority of his subsequently administered shots were Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines. Furthermore, he was administered multiple updated immunizations by Pfizer-BioNTech.
The man’s usual medical tests from both before and during the pandemic were consulted by the scientists in addition to their testing. However, the researchers noted that their results could not be applied to predict the reactions of other individuals to repeated vaccinations since they lacked access to other vaccine hoarders.
People shouldn’t disobey medical advice and obtain more shots than is advised because doing so could cause side effects in other patients who are given such high doses, according to Dr. Schober. Furthermore, the benefits of receiving many vaccinations did not always outweigh the slight risk of receiving one more shot, even though the study indicated that the immunizations were generally highly safe and may continue to enhance immune responses.
For example, the man’s antibody levels declined in the time following his last reported injection, which is typical for patients getting the recommended number of doses, according to Dr. Schober. The results indicated that constant vaccination was the only way to maintain the man’s heightened immune response.
