New York: Two years ago, German doctors found news reports of a man under investigation for receiving dozens of COVID-19 vaccines without any medical explanation.
Then followed a flurry of speculation about what he was up to. As it turned out, prosecutors were looking into whether he received so many extra doses as part of a scheme to collect stamped immunization cards that he could later sell to people who wanted to evade vaccine mandates.
A man has been investigated for fraud after receiving more than 200 booster doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.credit: AP
But to doctors, the man was a medical anomaly, someone who defied official recommendations and turned himself into a guinea pig to measure the outer limits of the immune response. Last year, they asked prosecutors investigating his boasts about vaccines to pass along a request: Would he like to join a research project?
Once prosecutors closed their investigation into the fraud without filing criminal charges, the man agreed.
By the time doctors first saw him, the 62-year-old had received 215 doses of the coronavirus vaccine, they said. In a mockery of their pleas to stop, he received two more doses in the following months, expanding his immune reserve to a combined 217 doses of eight different types of Covid vaccines over two-and-a-half years.
After months of studying it, the doctors, led by Kilian Schober, an immunologist at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in the German state of Bavaria, announced their findings this week in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseasesmedical journal.
It appears that the man was never infected with the Corona virus. No side effects of the vaccine were reported. Even more interesting to the researchers was that his stock of antibodies and immune cells was much larger than that of a typical vaccinated person, even if the accuracy of those immune responses remained virtually unchanged.
The researchers found that even shot No. 217 boosted the man's immune response. While they carefully looked for signs of gradual weakening of his immune responses over time — an unwelcome type of immune tolerance that sometimes develops during long-term viral infections — they reported seeing no such decline in responses.
“This really indicates how strong the immune system's response is to such repeated immunization,” Schober said. “Even 200 vaccinations are not as challenging to the immune system as a chronic infection.”
