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German man deliberately receives 217 Covid vaccinations over twenty-nine months, with no adverse events or strong effect on immune system
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- Title
- A man deliberately got 217 Covid shots. Here's what happened | CNN
- Authors
- Mira Cheng
- Published
- Mar 6 2024
Very clickbaity. In short, nothing happened. No additional immune response, no harm. It's good they had some researchers verify, but it's very much a "water is confirmed to be a liquid at room temperature" kind of study.
It makes sense. You're basically getting a very tiny handful of molecules each time that you already have antibodies for....an actual infection would be millions of times more. The only time you'd do better is if each vaccine had a substantially different variant.
I'd disagree that this was a very expected outcome. Immunological memory is often very complicated and nonintuitive. For instance, the current FDA approved Dengue vaccine is only recommended if you're already seropositive as getting it prior to infection increases risk of a severe infection. In contrast, Takeda is trialing a new vaccine against Dengue that is currently appearing to be fine to give to both seropositive and seronegative people. There's also lots of literature and meta reviews on repeated influenza vaccinations being detrimental (though still better than being unvaccinated).
But that sounds more like "The side afffects of the initial vaccination are bad enough it's not worth risking if you haven't already been infected."
Not that "taking this vaccine over and over will damage my body or make me more immune."
It's not that the Dengue vaccine causes side effects, but instead alters the immune response. The vaccine itself has no side effects, but will cause a future infection to be worse. The man not being directly affected by repetitive vaccinations would be expected, but no qualitative changes in his anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunity is interesting (and probably why this got published in The Lancet Infectious Disease, which is a top tier ID journal).
Are you telling me after taking the Dengue vaccine, it would be expected to have a bigger change in the immune response when taking it again a week later?
Cause that's what is under study for this guy and his COVID vaccines, if I read the article correctly. It's not saying he didn't respond to the vaccine, it's that revaccinating provided no further benefits.
You could get benefit from one of each unique version. But duplicates aren't gonna do squat.
No, I am saying that taking the Dengue vaccine without prior infection makes you more susceptible to severe infection. As N (vaccines) goes from 0 --> 1, the quality of the immune response goes down. In the linked meta analysis I sent in my first comment, it states that for influenza vaccinations, having 1 > 2 > 0, showing that increased vaccinations can, in fact, decrease ones immunity.
From the start of the paper discussed in the linked article:
The study is interesting because there wasn't much of a change in immunity in either direction going from a standard dosing regimen to 217 vaccinations.
Addressing your final paragraph: Getting repeated exposures to the same antigen can also enhance your immunity, hence getting a series of 2 COVID-19 vaccinations initially (at least for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines).
There are a few viruses (dengue, RSV, HIV) that are known to leverage antibodies to enhance their ability to infect cells. If a vaccine is only partially protective, it can potentially provide more Trojan Horses that allow these viruses to penetrate cell membranes.
Reinfection with dengue creates a high risk of a drastic immune overreaction called dengue hemorrhagic fever, which is every bit as dangerous as it sounds. It's still worth using a vaccine which can prevent that response, even if it may mean the dengue infection is worse.
Yes, vaccination is recommended if you've had a prior dengue infection, but if you've never had that first infection, you run the risk of the overreaction on your first infection if you have been vaccinated.
https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/vaccine/hcp/eligibility/index.html
To play the devil's advocate, this is basically as small a sample size as possible. It is also a very short amount of time for potential side effects to occur.
I wouldn’t bother talking with someone living with a self-induced mental illness. It’s like trying to talk an alcoholic into sobriety.
This never sits right with me. Who'd choose such a mental illness if not already down with it? And yet choose they did. Also, mental illness doesn't mean you don't want it cured, many alcoholics included. And yet they very deliberately want to spread it.
They jumped in, went deeper, and stayed each day for years or decades because they liked it, and saw no downsides. Maybe "mental self-mutilation cult"?
Change must come from within. Usually only after hitting rock bottom does an addict hit that conclusion on their own.
Hence why my brother ain't gettin squat from me.
I'm glad (and not surprised) that there's no ill health effects. But honestly I see this more as a failure of the German healthcare system than anything else -- vaccines aren't free and in unlimited supply, and that was even more true in summer 2021. I got my first vaccine around the same time as him and I had to travel to a city that's 2 hours away (by car) at my own expense to get my first two shots because it was so difficult to get a vaccination appointment in the city I lived in.
I'm not surprised he was able to do this -- there's shockingly little communication between different government departments and healthcare providers in Germany. But I do think it's a bad sign that a system like this could so easily involve what's essentially a single individual hoarding a limited resource like this, and I think it could have been easily been avoided if the relevant authorities communicated with each other... like, at all.
idk, what makes for a better headline: "Man denied covid vaccine" (read the fine print to see it would be his 50th one) or "Man gets 200 covid vaccines with no adverse effects"
if you put a policy to limit the number of vaccinations, then you have to pay the personnel & recordkeeping/software cost to enforce this, and possibly a public opinion cost if people deliberately fuck with the system to create fake-outrage headlines.
I'll take the not policing option.
...he got his first vaccines before they were even widely available to people under 60 who didn't have preexisting conditions. People were having trouble getting appointments to get vaccinated because of how high the demand was compared to the supply. We already policed Covid vaccines and it involved paperwork and signups with the government.
It seems pretty silly to claim that the government should be allowed to enact public health mandates like masking and vaccination but not to prevent someone from wasting a comical number of vaccines that are useless to him and could have gone to other people. I'm not suggesting he should be charged or anything, but someone should definitely have been able to look at a record of his vaccination history and deny him an appointment in favor of those who hadn't been vaccinated yet.
Wow, that's really extreme. My partner and I have been getting vaccinated almost every 1-2 months since November 2022 and I thought we were "hypervaccinated" 😂 (We've just been completing all the adult vaccinations recommended by our doctor, for pneumonia, hepatitis, chickenpox, measles, etc.; our latest was for shingles)
Is there a reason you didn’t get them in batches instead of one every month or so?
We just followed our doctor's recommendation. The max she'd give us was 2 at a time (1 on each arm). Some vaccines had multiple doses that needed to be spread out with 1-2 months in between.
Fair enough. At least the CDC recommends getting pretty much all recommended vaccines at once if possible. But if your doctor recommended spreading them out, that seems reasonable.
No adverse effects? I bet he constantly has a sore shoulder.
@cfabbro, mind helping making the title less clickbait? There were no adverse health effects, their immune system did not improve or worsen.
Edit: Ty, legend!
Wasn't me. Deimos himself actually edited the headline this time. :P
Oh wow, I feel honoured 😱😂
There are probably easier ways to forge a vaccine card.
A mentally ill person silently performs unapproved human experimentation with no ill effect, and probably still believes that it's all a hoax.
I read several different articles, and there was no mention of mental illness in any of them, nor any indication that he believed the vaccines were a hoax. I also found no mention of motive, other than that he did it for "private reasons". There was an investigation assuming he was selling the vaccine cards, but no charges were filed.
I believe you may have meant your comment hyperbolically, so I am not meaning to call you out for it. Certainly, the anti-vax misinformation is pervasive and problematic.
However, the struggle with medication for people with mental illness is real and tragic. I have a good friend who is a paranoid schizophrenic, and he was hospitalized once because he took an entire bottle of his pills. He was not trying to commit suicide, but rather to prove that the pills were a placebo. Once he got out of the ICU, he was hospitalized in a psych ward for 6 weeks. He had a turnaround (which was a miracle in itself, and I do not say that lightly or with exaggeration), and so narrowly avoided long-term involuntary commitment. Thankfully, there is a drug that manages his symptoms well that can be given as an injection every 6 months, rather than a daily pill, so it's much easier for him to stay on his medication. With that, and a lot of support from family and community, he's able to function more or less normally -- he has a job, is a great father to his kids, is active in the community -- even though he still has to manage those paranoid thoughts every day. His story is probably the best case. Many people who are similarly afflicted are not so lucky.
Now that's a click bait headline!
I think there’s multiple ways to interpret his behavior. He could be severely mentally unwell and have irrational reasons that only make sense to him. He could be in the early stages of dementia and be unaware of just how many shots he’s received.
It could be a political statement and he’s trying to prove the vaccines don’t actually do anything. But I was wondering if the opposite is true: that he was trying to prove the vaccines are effective and don’t cause any harm by taking an amount that would surely kill him otherwise.