On June 3, 2021, a roughly 60-year-old man within the riverside metropolis of Magdeburg, Germany, obtained his first COVID vaccine. He opted for Johnson & Johnson’s shot, widespread at that time as a result of not like Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, it was one-and-done. However that, evidently, was not what he had in thoughts. The next month, he bought the AstraZeneca vaccine. The month after that, he doubled up on AstraZeneca and added a Pfizer for good measure. Issues solely accelerated from there: In January 2022, he obtained a minimum of 49 COVID pictures.
Just a few months later, staff at an area vaccination heart thought to themselves, Huh, wasn’t that man in right here yesterday? and alerted the police. By that time, the German Press Company reported, the person had been vaccinated as many as 90 occasions. And nonetheless he was not completed. As of November, he stated he’d obtained 217 COVID pictures—217!
That’s in accordance with a brand new paper printed in The Lancet. After German researchers realized of the person from newspaper articles, they managed to contact him by way of the general public prosecutor investigating the case. He was “very ” in taking part in a research, Kilian Schober, an immunologist at Uniklinikum Erlangen and a co-author on the paper, stated in an announcement. They pieced collectively his vaccination timeline via interviews and medical data, and picked up blood and saliva samples to look at the immunological results of “hypervaccination.”
The person’s id hasn’t been revealed, and within the paper he’s referred to solely as “HIM” (seemingly an acronym, although what it stands for just isn’t specified). He’s hardly the world’s solely hypervaccinated individual. A retired postman in India had reportedly obtained 12 pictures by January 2022 and instructed The New York Occasions, “I nonetheless need extra.” A New Zealand man, in the meantime, allegedly racked up 10 in a single day. However pause for a second and contemplate the sheer logistics of HIM’s feat. In all, he obtained his 217 vaccinations over the course of slightly below two and a half years, which comes out to a median of seven and a half pictures a month, though the distribution was removed from even. For a number of weeks in early 2022, he obtained two pictures practically each day. He appears to have had a robust choice for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, however he additionally bought a minimum of one shot of AstraZeneca and Sanofi-GSK and, in fact, Johnson & Johnson.
Why? you may surprise. The paper itself elides this query, saying solely that he did so “intentionally and for personal causes.” Maybe the obvious clarification could be excessive, in all probability pathological COVID nervousness. Information studies from April 2022 provide one other doable clarification: that he did so to promote the vaccination playing cards. However German prosecutors didn’t convey expenses as soon as HIM’s scheme was uncovered, and he continued getting pointless pictures.
Getting 217 COVID pictures could be very a lot not the public-health steerage in Germany or anyplace else. But the technique seemingly panned out: HIM has by no means contracted COVID, researchers concluded primarily based on antigen assessments, PCR assessments, and bloodwork. “In the event you ask immunologists, we’d have predicted that it will be not helpful to do that,” Cindy Leifer, an immunologist at Cornell College who wasn’t concerned with the Lancet research, instructed me. They could have anticipated the fixed motion to exhaust the immune system, leaving it weak to precise viral threats. However such worries got here to nothing.
Nonetheless, immunologists cautioned in opposition to inferring any sturdy causal connection. He averted the virus; he bought vaccinated 217 occasions. He didn’t essentially keep away from the virus as a result of he bought vaccinated 217 occasions. The truth is, the authors wrote, though hypervaccination appears to have elevated the amount of antibodies and T cells that HIM’s physique produced to fend off the virus—even after 216 pictures, the 217th nonetheless produced a modest improve—it had no actual impact on the high quality of the immune response. “He would have been simply as effectively protected if he had gotten a traditional variety of three to 4 vaccinations,” Schober instructed me.
Nor did hypervaccination result in any adversarial results. By shot 217, one might need anticipated to see a number of the uncommon unintended effects related to the vaccines, resembling myocarditis, pericarditis, or Guillain-Barré Syndrome, however so far as researchers may inform, HIM was utterly wonderful. Remarkably, he didn’t even report feeling minor unintended effects from any of his 217 pictures. On some stage, this makes complete sense: As Schober moderately identified, HIM in all probability wouldn’t have gotten all these pictures if each had knocked him out for a day. Truthful, however nonetheless: 217 pictures and no unintended effects? How?
If nothing else, HIM is one hell of an commercial for the vaccines. Anxious about unintended effects out of your third booster? Effectively, this man’s gotten greater than 200, and he’s a-okay. Travis Kelce has been referred to as Mr. Pfizer, however he’s bought nothing on HIM. Scientifically, issues are considerably murkier. The outcomes of the HIM research had been largely unsurprising, researchers instructed me, however the mysteries on the margins—such because the absence of any unintended effects—are a superb reminder that 4 years after the pandemic started, immunology continues to be, as my former colleague Ed Yong wrote, “the place instinct goes to die.”
On the finish of the paper, the authors are very clear: “We don’t endorse hypervaccination as a method to boost adaptive immunity.” The takeaway, Leifer stated, shouldn’t be the extra pictures, the higher. Schober instructed me he even tried to personally convey this message to HIM after his 216th shot. “From the underside of my coronary heart as a medical physician, I actually instructed him that he shouldn’t get vaccinated once more,” Schober stated.
HIM appeared to take this recommendation critically. Then he went and bought shot No. 217 anyway.