Two years ago, German doctors came across news that a man was under investigation for having received dozens of coronavirus vaccines
without any medical explanation
.
A flurry of speculation followed about what he had done.
It turned out that prosecutors were investigating whether he had received so many extra doses as part of
a scheme to collect stamped vaccination cards
that he could then sell to other people who wanted to avoid vaccination mandates.
But to doctors, the man was a medical anomaly, someone who had defied official recommendations and become a guinea pig to test the limits of the immune response.
Last year, they asked prosecutors investigating his vaccine waste to convey a request:
Would you like to participate in a research project?
Once prosecutors closed their fraud investigation without criminal charges, the man accepted.
When doctors first saw him, the 62-year-old had received
215 doses of the
coronavirus vaccine.
Ignoring pleas for him to stop getting vaccinated, he received two more shots in the following months, expanding his immune reserve to
a total of 217 doses
of eight different types of Covid vaccines in two and a half years.
Most of the vaccines that man received were messenger RNA.
After months of study, the doctors, led by Kilian Schober, an immunologist at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in the German state of Bavaria, published their conclusions this week in the medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Apparently, the man
was never infected by the coronavirus
.
He did not declare
any side effects
of the vaccine.
And, most interestingly for researchers, his repertoire of antibodies and immune cells was
considerably greater
than that of a typical vaccinated person, even though the precision of those immune responses remained largely unchanged.
The researchers found that even the 217th dose boosted the man's immune response.
And although they carefully looked for signs of progressive weakening of their immune reactions over time - a type of unwanted immune tolerance that sometimes develops during long-term viral infections -
they saw no such decline
in responses.
"This really indicates how robust the immune system's response is to such repetitive immunization," Schober says.
"Even 200 vaccines do not pose as much of a challenge to the immune system as a chronic infection."
Investigators said the man was from Magdeburg, a city in central Germany, but offered few other details and said
his reasons
for the vaccination "party" were private.
Prosecutors had collected evidence of 130 vaccinations over nine months, investigators wrote.
The man's first vaccination, with a shot produced by Johnson & Johnson, occurred in June 2021. Most of his subsequent vaccinations were mRNA vaccines produced by Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech.
He also received several updated Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
In addition to their own tests, the scientists relied on the man's routine medical tests before and during the pandemic.
But because they didn't have access to other vaccine hoarders, the researchers said their findings couldn't be used to predict
how other people would react
to repeated inoculations.
Other patients given so many doses could experience side effects, Schober said, so
it would be unwise
for people to defy medical advice to receive more vaccines than recommended.
And while the study suggested that the vaccines were generally very safe and could continue to boost immune responses, the benefits of getting vaccinated repeatedly
did not necessarily outweigh
the small risk of an extra shot.
For example, according to Schober, the man's antibody levels decreased in the periods after the last recorded vaccinations, as is often the case in patients who receive the usual number of doses.
The finding suggested that man's elevated immune response could only be kept high
by continually revaccinating
.
"These high levels are not sustainable," says Schober.
"They would go down to the normal level."
Still, the two-and-a-half-year vaccine binge created a kind of immune system stress test that doctors would never have allowed to occur on their watch.
And while the results were far from conclusive, at least this man's immune system seemed remarkably resilient.
"Two hundred vaccines may seem like a lot," says Schober.
But immune cells capable of reacting to chronic viruses, she added, "basically laugh" at the imitation viral particles they have to deal with, even over hundreds of injections.
The New York Times. Special
Translation: Patricia Sar
P.S.