Two years in the past, German docs stumbled throughout information reviews 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 additional doses as a part of a scheme to gather stamped immunization playing cards that he may later promote to individuals who needed to skirt vaccine mandates.
However 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. Final yr, they requested prosecutors investigating his vaccine splurge to go alongside a request: Would he like to affix a analysis mission?
As soon as prosecutors closed their fraud investigation with out felony expenses, the person agreed.
By the point the docs 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 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 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 negative 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 have been rigorously in search of indicators of a progressive weakening in his immune reactions over time — an unwelcome kind of immune tolerance that typically develops throughout long-term viral infections — they reported seeing no such drop-off in responses.
“This means actually how sturdy the immune system’s response is to such repetitive immunization,” Dr. Schober mentioned. “Even 200 vaccinations should not practically as a lot of a problem to the immune system as a persistent 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 checks from earlier than and through the pandemic. However as a result of they’d no entry to different vaccine hoarders, the researchers mentioned their findings couldn’t be used to foretell how different individuals would react to repeated inoculations.
Different sufferers who’re given so many doses may expertise negative effects, Dr. Schober mentioned, making it unwise for individuals to defy medical recommendation to obtain greater than the really helpful variety of pictures. And whereas the examine advised 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 a further shot.
For example, Dr. Schober mentioned, the person’s antibody ranges dropped off within the intervals after his most up-to-date recorded pictures, as they typically do in sufferers receiving the same old variety of doses. The discovering advised that the person’s elevated immune response may solely be saved aloft by revaccinating on a regular basis.
“These super-high ranges should not sustainable,” Dr. Schober mentioned. “They might drop off to the conventional degree.”
Nonetheless, the two-and-a-half-year vaccine binge created a sort of immune system stress take a look at that docs by no means would have allowed to occur on their watch. And whereas the outcomes have been removed from conclusive, at the very least this one man’s immune system regarded remarkably resilient.
“200 vaccinations could seem to be quite a bit,” Dr. Schober mentioned. However immune cells able to reacting to persistent viruses, he added, “are mainly laughing” on the imitation viral particles that they should take care of, even over the course of tons of of pictures.
