A 62-year-old man who claims to have received 217 COVID-19 vaccines shows no symptoms of adverse effects from the shots and appears to have stronger immunity to the virus than others, researchers said as they warned others to get more of other recommended vaccines.
In a paper published Monday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, German researchers said they were surprised by the results and expected human immune cells to be less effective after getting used to antigens administered through eight other vaccines.
“Overall, we found no evidence of a weaker immune response, quite the opposite,” Katharina Kocher, one of the study’s lead authors, said in a news release.
Researchers from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the Universitätsklinikum in Erlangen, Germany, said they contacted the man, who is not known in the study, after seeing his story in newspapers.
According to the study, a prosecutor had amassed evidence to officially back up 130 of the 217 vaccines he had claimed, while investigating him for possible fraud. No charges have been filed against him.
Researchers invited the man, who said the injections lasted 29 months, to undergo testing and “was very, very interested in doing it,” said Dr. Kilian Schober of FAU’s Institute of Microbiology.
As part of the study, the man, who said he won multiple injections for “private reasons,” allowed investigators to examine blood tests he had undergone in recent years, adding frozen samples. They also took blood samples after he won other vaccine doses, which was done “at his own insistence,” Schober said.
“We were able to use those samples to determine precisely how the immune formula responds to vaccination,” Schober said.
In the end, the study found no improvement in the efficacy of the human immune formula in fighting other pathogens. Humans also had no noticeable side effects from the vaccines and showed particularly high concentrations of certain immune cells and antibodies that fight SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, than other people who received only 3 vaccines.
“While to date we have not discovered any evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in [humans], it cannot be clarified whether this is causally similar to the overvaccination regimen. Above all, we do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy for adaptive immunity,” the study concludes.
Last month, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report on the U. S. Department of Disease Control and Prevention. The U. S. Department of Health updated its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, advising adults 65 and older to get an additional dose of updated vaccine. Immunocompromised Americans were already eligible to receive the additional dose.
“Data continue to show the importance of vaccination in protecting those who are most at risk for severe effects from COVID-19,” the CDC said. “An additional dose of the updated COVID-19 vaccine may simply repair coverage that has declined since one dose of vaccine was administered in the fall, offering greater coverage for adults 65 and older. “