One German man has redefined “man on a mission.” A 62-year-old from Magdeburg deliberately got 217 Covid-19 vaccine shots in the span of 29 months, according to a new study, going against national vaccine recommendations. That’s an average of one jab every four days.
In the process, he became a walking experiment for what happens to the immune system when it is vaccinated against the same pathogen repeatedly. 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 or worsen his immune response.
The man, who is not named in the correspondence in compliance with German privacy rules, reported receiving 217 Covid shots between June 2021 and November 2023. Of those, 134 were confirmed by a prosecutor and through vaccination center documentation; the remaining 83 were self-reported, according to the study.
“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.”
