This August 2022 photo provided by Pfizer shows vials of the company's updated COVID-19 vaccine during production in Kalamazoo, Mich. U.S. regulators have authorized updated COVID-19 boosters, the first to directly target today's most common omicron strain. The move on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2022, by the Food and Drug Administration tweaks the recipe of shots made by Pfizer and rival Moderna that already have saved millions of lives. (Pfizer via AP)
A German man deliberately got 213 COVID-19 vaccine shots in less than a year, becoming a walking experiment for what happens to the immune system when it is vaccinated repeatedly against the same pathogen.
A correspondence published Monday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases outlined his case and concluded that while his “hypervaccination” did not result in any adverse health effects, it also did not significantly improve his immune response.
The 62-year-old man from Magdeburg is not named in the correspondence in compliance with German privacy rules. Of the shots, 134 were confirmed by a prosecutor and through vaccination center documentation; the rest were self-reported.
According to his immunization history, the man got his first COVID vaccine in June 2021, then went on to get 16 more that year.
He ramped up his efforts in 2022, getting 48 shots in January and 34 in February.
Around that time, German Red Cross staff members in Dresden became suspicious and issued a warning to other vaccination centers, encouraging them to call the police if they saw the man, CNN affiliate RTL reported.
In March 2022, he was detained in a vaccination center in Eilenburg by police who suspected him of selling vaccination cards to third parties, according to RTL. The public prosecutor in Magdeburg opened an investigation but did not end up filing criminal charges, according to the study.
The researchers read about the man in the news and reached out to him in May 2022. He agreed to provide medical information, blood and saliva samples. By that point, he was 213 shots in; he later got four more, against the researchers’ medical advice, said Kilian Schober, senior author of the new study and a researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg
“This is a really unusual case of someone receiving that many COVID vaccines, clearly not following any type of guidelines,” said Dr. Emily Happy Miller, an assistant professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who did not participate in the research.
The man did not report any vaccine-related side effects and has not had a COVID infection to date, as evidenced by repeated antigen and PCR testing between May 2022 and November 2023. The researchers caution that it’s not clear that his COVID status is directly because of his hypervaccination regimen.
“Perhaps he didn’t get COVID because he was well-protected in the first three doses of the vaccine,” Miller said. “We also don’t know anything about his behaviors.”
Schober said it is important to remember that this is an individual case study, and the results are not generalizable.
The researchers also say they do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance immunity.
“The benefit is not much bigger if you get vaccinated three times or 200 times,” Schober said.
The researchers analyzed his blood chemistries, which showed no abnormalities linked to his hypervaccination. They also looked at various markers to evaluate how his adaptive immune system was functioning, according to the study.
In total, the man got eight vaccine formulations, including mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, a vector-based vaccine from Johnson & Johnson and a recombinant-protein vaccine from Sanofi. He got them in both arms.
The-CNN-Wire
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