In the process, it became a walking test of what happens to the immune system when repeatedly vaccinated against the same pathogen. A Correspondence His case, published Monday in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal, outlined his case that while the “high-dose vaccine” did not cause any adverse health effects, it did not significantly improve or worsen the immune response.
The person whose name is not mentioned in the letter According to German privacy laws, 217 Covid vaccines were reported to have been received between June 2021 and November 2023. Of these, 134 were confirmed by prosecutors and vaccination center documents. The remaining 83 were self-reported, the study found.
“This is a really rare case where one person has received that many covid vaccines,” said Dr. Emily Happy Miller, assistant professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Participation in research.
Repeated antigen and PCR tests performed between May 2022 and November 2023 confirmed that the man has not reported any vaccine-related adverse events and has not developed a covid infection to date. The researchers caution that it is unclear whether the Covid-19 situation is straightforward. His hypervaccination regimen.
“Maybe he didn’t get Covid because he was well protected with the first three shots,” Miller said. We know nothing about his character.
Dr. Kilian Schober, senior author of the new study and a researcher at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, said it’s important to remember that this is a case study, and the results are not generalizable.
The researchers also said that they do not support the hypervaccination as a strategy to strengthen the immune system.
“If you get vaccinated three times or 200 times, the benefit is not that big,” Schober said.
According to his vaccination history, the man received his first Covid vaccination in June 2021. In that year, 16 vaccinations were administered in the state of East Saxony.
In the year He stepped up his efforts in 2022, rolling up his sleeves to shoot with both his right and left hands almost every day in January, totaling 48 shots that month.
Then he kept going: 34 shots in February and six more shots in March. Around this time, German Red Cross workers in the city of Dresden became suspicious and alerted other vaccination centers, encouraging them to call the police if they saw the man again, CNN affiliate RTL reported. reported In April 2022.
At the beginning of March, he was found at a vaccination center in the city of Illenberg and arrested by the police. He is suspected of selling the vaccination cards to third parties, RTL reports. This was when many European countries wanted it Proof of vaccination To reach and travel public places.
The public prosecutor in Magdeburg has opened an investigation against a man who issued unauthorized vaccination cards and forged documents, but the investigation indicated that criminal charges had been filed.
The researchers read about the man in the news and contacted him in May 2022 through the prosecutor investigating their case. At this point, 213 rounds have been fired.
He agreed to provide medical information, blood and saliva samples. Shober also said that he received four more Covid vaccines against the researchers’ medical advice.
The researchers analyzed his blood chemistry, which showed no problems related to the high doses. According to the study, they looked at different symptoms to evaluate how his adaptive immune system works.
The adaptive immune system is a subset of the immune system that learns to recognize and respond to specific pathogens as you encounter them throughout your life, Miller said. There are two main types of cells in the adaptive immune system: T cells and B cells.
In chronic diseases like HIV and hepatitis B, immune cells can become fatigued and lose their ability to fight effectively due to frequent exposure to pathogens, Schober said. Hypervaccination could theoretically have the same effect.
However, this is not what the researchers found. In this case, hypervaccination increased the amount (the number of T cell and B cell products) but did not affect the quality of the adaptive immune system, according to the study.
“If you treat the immune system as an army, the number of soldiers is high, but the soldiers themselves are not different,” Schober said.
In total, the man received eight vaccine formulations, including a vector-based vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, a vector-based vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, and a recombinant protein vaccine from Sanofi.
“The fact that no side effects were provoked despite this unusual vaccine regimen shows that the drugs have a good tolerability level,” Schober said. News release.
While interesting from a scientific standpoint, such individual case studies should always be taken with a grain of salt, Miller said. Public health recommendations based on very large randomized control trials are what people should look to for guidance, he said.
“I don’t think any physician or public health official would be advised to do what this man did. This is really uncharted territory,” Miller said. “Talk to your doctor, follow the recommended vaccination schedule, and that should be the best thing to keep you both safe and healthy from Covid.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the Covid vaccine for everyone in the United States 6 months of age or older, as listed on the immunization schedule. website. Last week, the CDC Updated the guide To recommend additional current doses of the covid vaccine for people age 65 and older.
Less than a quarter of adults and only 13% of children in the US have received the most recently recommended Covid vaccine. CDC data.