Two years in the past, German docs stumbled throughout information studies of a person being investigated for receiving scores of coronavirus vaccines with no medical rationalization.
Then adopted a flurry of hypothesis about what he had been as much as. As it turned out, prosecutors had been wanting into whether or not he had been receiving so many additional doses as a part of a scheme to gather stamped immunization playing cards that he might later promote to individuals who wished to skirt vaccine mandates.
But to the docs, the person was a medical anomaly, somebody who had defied official suggestions and turned himself right into a guinea pig for measuring the outer limits of an immune response. Last yr, they requested prosecutors investigating his vaccine splurge to move alongside a request: Would he like to affix a analysis undertaking?
Once prosecutors closed their fraud investigation with out prison costs, the person agreed.
By the time the docs first noticed him, the 62-year-old man had obtained 215 doses of coronavirus vaccine, they stated. Flouting their pleas to cease, he obtained one other two photographs within the subsequent months, increasing his immunological stockpile to a mixed 217 doses of eight completely different Covid vaccine varieties over two and a half years.
After months of finding out him, the docs, led by Dr. Kilian Schober, an immunologist on the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg within the German state of Bavaria, reported their findings this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a medical journal.
The man had seemingly by no means been contaminated with the coronavirus. He reported no vaccine unwanted effects. And, most curiously to the researchers, his repertoire of antibodies and immune cells was significantly bigger than that of a typical vaccinated particular person, even when the precision of these immune responses remained successfully unchanged.
The researchers discovered that even the 217th shot boosted the person’s immune response. And whereas they had been rigorously on the lookout for indicators of a progressive weakening in his immune reactions over time — an unwelcome sort of immune tolerance that generally develops throughout long-term viral infections — they reported seeing no such drop-off in responses.
“This indicates really how robust the immune system’s response is to such repetitive immunization,” Dr. Schober stated. “Even 200 vaccinations are not nearly as much of a challenge to the immune system as a chronic infection.”
The researchers stated the person was from Magdeburg, a metropolis in central Germany, however supplied few different particulars and stated his causes for the vaccination spree had been personal.
The prosecutors had collected proof of 130 vaccinations over 9 months, the researchers wrote. The man’s first vaccination, with a shot made by Johnson & Johnson, got here in June 2021. Most of his subsequent photographs had been mRNA vaccines made by Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech. He additionally obtained a number of of Pfizer-BioNTech’s up to date vaccines.
In addition to their very own testing, the scientists relied on the person’s routine medical checks from earlier than and throughout the pandemic. But as a result of that they had no entry to different vaccine hoarders, the researchers stated their findings couldn’t be used to foretell how different individuals would react to repeated inoculations.
Other sufferers who’re given so many doses might expertise unwanted effects, Dr. Schober stated, making it unwise for individuals to defy medical recommendation to obtain greater than the really helpful variety of photographs. And whereas the examine urged each that the vaccines had been usually very protected and will proceed to spice up immune responses, the advantages of being repeatedly vaccinated didn’t essentially outweigh the small threat of an extra shot.
For occasion, Dr. Schober stated, the person’s antibody ranges dropped off within the intervals after his most up-to-date recorded photographs, as they typically do in sufferers receiving the standard variety of doses. The discovering urged that the person’s elevated immune response might solely be stored aloft by revaccinating on a regular basis.
“These super-high levels are not sustainable,” Dr. Schober stated. “They would drop off to the normal level.”
Still, the two-and-a-half-year vaccine binge created a sort of immune system stress check that docs by no means would have allowed to occur on their watch. And whereas the outcomes had been removed from conclusive, no less than this one man’s immune system seemed remarkably resilient.
“Two hundred vaccinations may seem like a lot,” Dr. Schober stated. But immune cells able to reacting to power viruses, he added, “are basically laughing” on the imitation viral particles that they need to take care of, even over the course of tons of of photographs.
