A 62-year-old man received 217 vaccines against COVID-19 in a period of only 29 months - between June 2021 and November 2023 -, without presenting side effects or damage to his immune system, German researchers explained last Monday, according to The Washington Post newspaper.
The examinations carried out on the man, a native of Magdeburg (Germany) and whose identity is not mentioned, determined that the coronavirus vaccines have a “good degree of tolerability”, according to the conclusions published in the specialized journal Lance Infectious Diseases.
The case, described as isolated and of “extraordinary hypervaccination”, came to light after the German prosecutor's office opened an investigation for fraud against the man, after initially establishing that he had received 130 vaccines in just nine months;
an amount well above those recommended by the country's health authorities.
A patient gets vaccinated against the flu and COVID-19 in Pasadena, California, on October 12, 2023.Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images file
Although an initial investigation, according to Spiegel magazine, established the suspicion that the man had sold vaccination certificates to people who did not want to be immunized, German authorities did not file charges against him.
The publication of the study stated that the researchers contacted the man after learning about the case through the press and invited him to undergo tests to determine if the large number of vaccines had fatigued his immune system.
“We invited him to undergo several tests and he was very interested in participating,” explained Kilian Schober, one of the authors of the study.
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The study indicated that they managed to collect frozen and other more recent blood samples, after the man told them that he had received 217 vaccines “for private reasons.”
Despite initial fears about the damage that hypervaccination could have caused, the researchers did not detect fatigue in the immune cells - known as T cells - that are obtained in each vaccine, which indicated to be as effective in those of man as in people who had received the recommended doses.
Furthermore, specialists stated that, even with the latest vaccine, the man's antibodies increased significantly.
However, despite these findings, the researchers made it clear that "they do not support hypervaccination as a strategy to improve immunity," since, although they could not find any indication that the man had contracted coronavirus, they could not establish that due to this, in addition to the fact that the risk of having unnecessary side effects is high.
Prof. Dr. Andreas Radbruch, an immunologist and president of the European Federation of Associations of Experts in Immunology (EFIS), who was not involved in the study, told The Guardian that hypervaccination would not increase a person's protection beyond the point at which your immunological memory assimilates it.
“The vaccine is absorbed by antibodies before it can trigger an immune response.
Above a certain level of antibody concentration, the immune system shuts down and new antibodies are no longer manufactured,” he explained.
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In Germany, authorities recommend people considered at risk and everyone over 60 years of age to get vaccinated against the coronavirus every autumn.
More than 60 million Germans have been vaccinated against COVID-19, and most of them have received multiple doses.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended in February that people over 65 years of age receive a new dose of the updated vaccine, due to the risk of contracting serious illnesses from of COVID-19.
The agency also recommended coronavirus vaccination for everyone 6 months and older.