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New York: Two years ago, German doctors stumbled across news reports of a man being investigated for receiving scores of COVID-19 vaccines with no medical explanation.
Then followed a flurry of speculation about what he had been up to. As it turned out, prosecutors were looking into whether he had been receiving so many extra doses as part of a scheme to collect stamped immunisation cards that he could later sell to people who wanted to skirt vaccine mandates.
A man was investigated for fraud after having more than 200 COVID-19 vaccine boosters.Credit: AP
But to the doctors, the man was a medical anomaly, someone who had defied official recommendations and turned himself into a guinea pig for measuring the outer limits of an immune response. Last year, they asked prosecutors investigating his vaccine splurge to pass along a request: would he like to join a research project?
Once prosecutors closed their fraud investigation without criminal charges, the man agreed.
By the time the doctors first saw him, the 62-year-old man had received 215 doses of coronavirus vaccine, they said. Flouting their pleas to stop, he received another two shots in the next months, expanding his immunological stockpile to a combined 217 doses of eight different COVID vaccine types over 2½ years.
After months of studying him, the doctors, led by Kilian Schober, an immunologist at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in the German state of Bavaria, reported their findings this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a medical journal.
The man had seemingly never been infected with the coronavirus. He reported no vaccine side effects. And, most interestingly to the researchers, his repertoire of antibodies and immune cells was considerably larger than that of a typical vaccinated person, even if the precision of those immune responses remained effectively unchanged.
The researchers found that even the 217th shot boosted the man’s immune response. And while they were carefully looking for signs of a progressive weakening in his immune reactions over time – an unwelcome type of immune tolerance that sometimes develops during long-term viral infections – they reported seeing no such drop-off in responses.
“This indicates really how robust the immune system’s response is to such repetitive immunisation,” Schober said. “Even 200 vaccinations are not nearly as much of a challenge to the immune system as a chronic infection.”