Two years in the past, German medical doctors stumbled throughout information stories 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. Because it turned out, prosecutors have been trying into whether or not he had been receiving so many further 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.
However to the medical doctors, 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. Final 12 months, they requested prosecutors investigating his vaccine splurge to move alongside a request: Would he like to affix a analysis challenge?
As soon as prosecutors closed their fraud investigation with out prison prices, the person agreed.
By the point the medical doctors first noticed him, the 62-year-old man had obtained 215 doses of coronavirus vaccine, they mentioned. Flouting their pleas to cease, he obtained one other two pictures within the subsequent months, increasing his immunological stockpile to a mixed 217 doses of eight totally different Covid vaccine sorts over two and a half years.
After months of finding out him, the medical doctors, led by Dr. Kilian Schober, an immunologist on the College of Erlangen-Nuremberg within the German state of Bavaria, reported their findings this week in The Lancet Infectious Illnesses, a medical journal.
The person had seemingly by no means been contaminated with the coronavirus. He reported no vaccine unintended effects. And, most apparently 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 have been rigorously in search of indicators of a progressive weakening in his immune reactions over time — an unwelcome kind of immune tolerance that generally develops throughout long-term viral infections — they reported seeing no such drop-off in responses.
“This means actually how strong the immune system’s response is to such repetitive immunization,” Dr. Schober mentioned. “Even 200 vaccinations are usually not practically as a lot of a problem to the immune system as a continual an infection.”
The researchers mentioned the person was from Magdeburg, a metropolis in central Germany, however supplied few different particulars and mentioned his causes for the vaccination spree have been non-public.
The prosecutors had collected proof of 130 vaccinations over 9 months, the researchers wrote. The person’s first vaccination, with a shot made by Johnson & Johnson, got here in June 2021. Most of his subsequent pictures have been mRNA vaccines made by Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech. He additionally obtained a number of of Pfizer-BioNTech’s up to date vaccines.
Along with their very own testing, the scientists relied on the person’s routine medical assessments from earlier than and through the pandemic. However as a result of that they had no entry to different vaccine hoarders, the researchers mentioned their findings couldn’t be used to foretell how different folks would react to repeated inoculations.
Different sufferers who’re given so many doses might expertise unintended effects, Dr. Schober mentioned, making it unwise for folks to defy medical recommendation to obtain greater than the advisable variety of pictures. And whereas the examine prompt each that the vaccines have been typically 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 example, Dr. Schober mentioned, the person’s antibody ranges dropped off within the durations after his most up-to-date recorded pictures, as they typically do in sufferers receiving the standard variety of doses. The discovering prompt that the person’s elevated immune response might solely be saved aloft by revaccinating on a regular basis.
“These super-high ranges are usually not sustainable,” Dr. Schober mentioned. “They might drop off to the traditional degree.”
Nonetheless, the two-and-a-half-year vaccine binge created a sort of immune system stress take a look at that medical doctors by no means would have allowed to occur on their watch. And whereas the outcomes have been removed from conclusive, at the least this one man’s immune system seemed remarkably resilient.
“2 hundred vaccinations might seem to be so much,” Dr. Schober mentioned. However immune cells able to reacting to continual viruses, he added, “are principally laughing” on the imitation viral particles that they should take care of, even over the course of a whole bunch of pictures.
