When the news reached the newspapers, in 2022, someone accused him of doing it to defraud the German Green Pass, and resell counterfeit certificates to those who did not want to get vaccinated. It is not known whether things went exactly like this, or whether it was instead the fear of the disease that pushed him, or perhaps some form of “vaccine fetishism”. The fact is that a 62-year-old German has done practically nothing in the last four years other than vaccinate himself against Covid 19, reaching the record figure of over 200 injections with all the main vaccines available in Europe. The case had caused a sensation at the time, and today a group of researchers from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg took advantage of this natural experiment to study the effects that hypervaccination has on the immune system and human health, describing their results in a study just published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The fears
Clearly, undergoing such a large number of vaccinations in the space of a few years is neither recommended nor probably useful, especially if they are all directed against the same infectious agent. Among the possible contraindications of such frequent stimulation of our immune system there is also the risk of tiring it, and paradoxically making it less effective in fighting infections. “It could be what happens in the case of chronic infections such as HIV or hepatitis B, which have frequent flare-ups,” explains Kilian Schober, immunologist who participated in the study. “There are indications that one type of immune cell, T lymphocytes, becomes fatigued and releases fewer pro-inflammatory substances.” With the possible result that frequent exposure to the same antigen ends up reducing the effectiveness of the immune system.
It is this hypothesis that German researchers decided to test. They then contacted the sixty-two-year-old, asking him to undergo a battery of tests to analyze the state of his immune system. The man agreed to cooperate, also providing blood samples taken from him over the last four years. And the researchers were then able to get to work.
The results
In total, researchers managed to confirm 134 Covid 19 vaccinations performed with vaccines of all brands. The man also stated that he never developed side effects following the injections. Moving on to the analyses, the first results confirmed the presence in his blood of a high level of effector T lymphocytes directed against the Sars-Cov-2 virus (which causes Covid), a type of immune cell that recognizes and fights the virus when it invades our cells. The levels in the blood of the hypervaccinated man were higher than those of people who had received the 3 normally recommended vaccinations against the virus, and showed no difference in their effectiveness.
A second type of cells, called memory T lymphocytes, were found to be present at equal levels in the blood of the 62-year-old and in that of people vaccinated with 3 injections. Another clue that would demonstrate that the man did not suffer any adverse effects from the hypervaccination to which he underwent, given that these are cells necessary to replace the no longer functioning effector T lymphocytes, and one would expect to see their level decrease in the case where the immune system was fatigued by repeated exposure to an antigen. Finally, the levels of antibodies against Sars-Cov-2 were much higher in the body of the hypervaccinated man.
“The number of memory cells was as high as that of the subjects in the control group,” explains Katharina Kocher, one of the authors of the study. “All things considered, we found no trace of a weakening of the immune response, quite the opposite.” Obviously, it is worth underlining that a single case does not allow the effects of such frequent vaccination to be generalized to the entire population. And that getting vaccinated more often than indicated by the health authorities is dangerous and senseless. Having said that, the analyzes carried out on humans of the 200 anti-Covid vaccines offer interesting data, which seem to indicate that our immune system is unlikely to become fatigued with prolonged exposure to an antigen. If not for his health – then – the 62-year-old’s obsession with vaccination seems to have proved useful, at least, for science.