A team of medical professionals has outlined the unusual case of a man who received 217 COVID-19 vaccinations within the space of 29 months.

Though it is a good idea to get COVID-19 vaccinations as the virus evolves and immunity wanes, there is no government on Earth that recommends taking over 200 vaccines in such a short space of time. The unnamed male from Magdeburg, Germany, took the vaccines for "private reasons", according to a case report. During that time, he attracted the attention of the public prosecutor of Magdeburg, who managed to confirm that he had taken 130 vaccinations but decided not to file criminal charges for fraud. 

This presented something of an opportunity for immunologists looking to see the effects this number of vaccines had on the patient.

"When, in 2022, the media reported about a man from Germany who received at least 90 vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2, we (as many others) wondered what kind of consequences such hypervaccination would have on the immune system," Dr Kilian Schober, an author on the paper, wrote on X (Twitter).

The team contacted the prosecutor, who contacted the 62-year-old, who in turn agreed to undergo various medical tests in Erlangen. As well as this, the team was allowed to access blood tests that the patient had had during this time period, as well as the results of tests for COVID-19 infection.

The patient was found to have large amounts of T effector cells against SARS-CoV-2, higher even than those who had been vaccinated three times, and with no sign of fatigue in these cells. He also suffered no side effects from any of the vaccines he took.

“Our test subject was vaccinated with a total of eight different vaccines, including various available mRNA vaccines,” Schober added in a statement. “The observation that there were no noticeable side effects despite this extraordinary hypervaccination is consistent with the generally good tolerability of the preparations.”

Though the case is a curiosity (and it's good news that the patient is healthy) there's not a lot that we can extrapolate from this one case report – and it's unlikely that anybody will push for clinical trials of hundreds of vaccines a year, given the high effectiveness of the vaccines at the moment.

"Our case report shows that SARS-CoV-2 hypervaccination did not lead to adverse events and increased the quantity of spike-specific antibodies and T cells without having a strong positive or negative effect on the intrinsic quality of adaptive immune responses," the authors conclude in their paper. "While we found no signs of SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections in HIM to date, it cannot be clarified whether this is causally related to the hypervaccination regimen. Importantly, we do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity."

The case report is published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.