Scientists have studied the immune system of a man in Germany who claims to have received 217 Covid-19 vaccines.
The researchers were concerned that the man’s immune system might have become exhausted with such frequent and numerous challenges with vaccines against the same virus, but they actually found the opposite.
Their analysis published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases found that not only did the man, 62, have a fully functional immune system, there were indicators that his immunity against the virus that causes Covid-19 was better than people who had just received a normal number of vaccines.
There is official evidence of the man having 134 Covid-19 vaccines of eight different types including mRNA vaccines over a nine-month period, although the man claims the amount to be 217 in total over 29 months.
It is not known why he chose to have so many vaccines. As of the last update in May 2023, the CDC Covid-19 vaccination dashboard indicated that 69.5% of Americans had completed at least the primary 2-dose vaccination series. Due to the stopping of comprehensive tracking after this date, it is tricky to figure out how many vaccines is typical in the U.S. Many people have received additional bivalent vaccines and individuals who are immunocompromised may have received more Covid-19 vaccines than typical healthy people. But the majority of people are unlikely to have had any more than 5-6 Covid-19 vaccines, making this man’s sheer number of vaccines highly unusual.
Initially the public prosecutor in the city of Magdeburg, where the man lived, had opened a fraud investigation into him, but it never filed charges.
The scientists found the man through newspaper reports and approached him to see whether he would be willing to be studied.
“We contacted him and invited him to undergo various tests in Erlangen. He was very interested in doing so,” said Dr. Kilian Schober from the Institute of Microbiology at Germany’s University Hospital of Erlangen, speaking in a press release about the work.
The man gave the researchers new blood and saliva samples as well as access to blood samples that had been taken after he received some—but not all—of his vaccines. He also insisted on getting more vaccines after he had been in touch with the researchers and gave them blood samples after those, too.
“We were also able to take blood samples ourselves when the man received a further vaccination during the study at his own insistence. We were able to use these samples to determine exactly how the immune system reacts to the vaccination,” said Schober.
The man did not report any vaccine-related side effects to the research team. Even the 217th vaccination that the man received had an effect on his immune cells, with the researchers finding that the number of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 increased significantly as a result.
“Overall, we did not find any indication for a weaker immune response, rather the contrary,” said Katharina Kocher, another researcher involved in the study.
The researchers also tested the man for evidence of a previous Covid-19 infection, finding none.
Although the hundreds of vaccinations the man received appear to have had no ill effects on him, the researchers stress in the paper that they do not recommend this approach, noting “We do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity.”
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