Two years in the past, German medical doctors stumbled throughout information studies of a person being investigated for receiving scores of coronavirus vaccines with no medical clarification.

Then adopted a flurry of hypothesis about what he had been as much as. Because it turned out, prosecutors had been trying into whether or not he had been receiving so many additional doses as a part of a scheme to gather stamped immunization playing cards that he might later promote to individuals who wished to skirt vaccine mandates.

However to the medical doctors, the person was a medical anomaly, somebody who had defied official suggestions and turned himself right into a guinea pig for measuring the outer limits of an immune response. Final 12 months, they requested prosecutors investigating his vaccine splurge to cross alongside a request: Would he like to affix a analysis mission?

As soon as prosecutors closed their fraud investigation with out legal costs, the person agreed.

By the point the medical doctors first noticed him, the 62-year-old man had acquired 215 doses of coronavirus vaccine, they mentioned. Flouting their pleas to cease, he acquired one other two photographs within the subsequent months, increasing his immunological stockpile to a mixed 217 doses of eight completely different Covid vaccine varieties over two and a half years.

After months of learning him, the medical doctors, led by Dr. Kilian Schober, an immunologist on the College of Erlangen-Nuremberg within the German state of Bavaria, reported their findings this week in The Lancet Infectious Ailments, a medical journal.

The person had seemingly by no means been contaminated with the coronavirus. He reported no vaccine unintended effects. And, most apparently to the researchers, his repertoire of antibodies and immune cells was significantly bigger than that of a typical vaccinated particular person, even when the precision of these immune responses remained successfully unchanged.

The researchers discovered that even the 217th shot boosted the person’s immune response. And whereas they had been fastidiously on the lookout for indicators of a progressive weakening in his immune reactions over time — an unwelcome sort of immune tolerance that typically develops throughout long-term viral infections — they reported seeing no such drop-off in responses.

“This means actually how sturdy the immune system’s response is to such repetitive immunization,” Dr. Schober mentioned. “Even 200 vaccinations will not be almost as a lot of a problem to the immune system as a persistent an infection.”

The researchers mentioned the person was from Magdeburg, a metropolis in central Germany, however supplied few different particulars and mentioned his causes for the vaccination spree had been non-public.

The prosecutors had collected proof of 130 vaccinations over 9 months, the researchers wrote. The person’s first vaccination, with a shot made by Johnson & Johnson, got here in June 2021. Most of his subsequent photographs had been mRNA vaccines made by Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech. He additionally acquired a number of of Pfizer-BioNTech’s up to date vaccines.

Along with their very own testing, the scientists relied on the person’s routine medical exams from earlier than and throughout the pandemic. However as a result of they’d no entry to different vaccine hoarders, the researchers mentioned their findings couldn’t be used to foretell how different folks would react to repeated inoculations.

Different sufferers who’re given so many doses might expertise unintended effects, Dr. Schober mentioned, making it unwise for folks to defy medical recommendation to obtain greater than the really helpful variety of photographs. And whereas the examine steered each that the vaccines had been typically very protected and will proceed to spice up immune responses, the advantages of being repeatedly vaccinated didn’t essentially outweigh the small threat of an extra shot.

As an illustration, Dr. Schober mentioned, the person’s antibody ranges dropped off within the intervals after his most up-to-date recorded photographs, as they often do in sufferers receiving the same old variety of doses. The discovering steered that the person’s elevated immune response might solely be saved aloft by revaccinating on a regular basis.

“These super-high ranges will not be sustainable,” Dr. Schober mentioned. “They’d drop off to the traditional stage.”

Nonetheless, the two-and-a-half-year vaccine binge created a kind of immune system stress check that medical doctors by no means would have allowed to occur on their watch. And whereas the outcomes had been removed from conclusive, at the very least this one man’s immune system appeared remarkably resilient.

“2 hundred vaccinations might look like lots,” Dr. Schober mentioned. However immune cells able to reacting to persistent viruses, he added, “are principally laughing” on the imitation viral particles that they must cope with, even over the course of a whole bunch of photographs.