A German man claims to have received 217 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. (representative)
New Delhi:
Researchers examined a man in Germany who said he had received 217 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine and found that his immune system was fully functional.
So far, it’s unclear what effect this overvaccination will have on the immune system. Some scientists believe that immune cells become less effective as they become accustomed to the antigen.
However, a case study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases found that the person’s immune system was fully functional.
Researchers say more than 60 million people in Germany have been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, most of them multiple times.
A team from the Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) in Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, examined the man, who claimed to have received 217 vaccines for personal reasons. Of those, 134 vaccines have been officially confirmed, they said.
“We learned about his case through newspaper articles,” said FAU’s Kilian Schober.
“Then we contacted him and invited him to Erlangen (a city in Germany) to undergo various tests. He was very interested,” he said.
Vaccines contain parts of the pathogen or a structure that the vaccinated person’s cells can use to produce these disease-causing components on their own.
Thanks to these antigens, the immune system learns to recognize the real pathogen in future infections. It can then respond more quickly and powerfully.
The researchers wanted to analyze what happens if the body’s immune system is exposed to a specific antigen very frequently.
“This can occur with chronic infections such as HIV or hepatitis B, which come back at regular intervals,” Scober explained.
“There are indications that certain types of immune cells, known as T cells, become fatigued, causing them to release fewer pro-inflammatory messenger substances,” he added.
This and other effects caused by cells becoming accustomed to the antigen weaken the immune system so that it is no longer able to effectively fight the pathogen.
However, the researchers say the study does not provide any indication that this is the case.
“We were also able to collect blood samples ourselves when the man persisted in receiving further vaccinations during the study. We were able to use these samples to determine the precise response of the immune system to the vaccination,” Shober said.
The results showed that this individual had a large number of T effector cells targeting SARS-CoV-2. Researchers say they act like the body’s own soldiers against viruses.
They said the person even received more vaccines than a control group that received three vaccines.
The researchers did not detect any fatigue in these effector cells. Their vaccine efficacy was similar to a control group that received a normal number of vaccinations.
They also explored memory T cells—primary-stage cells that, similar to stem cells, can replenish the population of appropriate effector cells.
“There were just as many memory cells in our test cases as in the control group,” explains Katharina Kocher, one of the study’s lead authors.
“Overall, we did not find any signs of a weakened immune response, on the contrary,” Koch added.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
