The Lancet link has slightly more detail - sounds like he's a bit crazy and they were investigating him because they thought there was fraud happening but then they realized he was just 'hypervaccinated' and so they didn't file charges and enrolled him in this study;
> Here, we report on a 62-year-old male hypervaccinated individual from Magdeburg, Germany (HIM), who deliberately and for private reasons received 217 vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 within a period of 29 months (figure A; appendix 1 tab 1). HIM's hypervaccination occurred outside of a clinical study context and against national vaccination recommendations. Evidence for 130 vaccinations in a 9 month period was collected by the public prosecutor of Magdeburg, Germany, who opened an investigation of this case with the allegation of fraud, but criminal charges were not filed. 108 vaccinations are individually recorded and partly overlap with the total of 130 prosecutor-confirmed vaccinations (appendix 2 p 12). To investigate the immunological consequences of hypervaccination in this unique situation, we submitted an analysis proposal to HIM via the public prosecutor. HIM then actively and voluntarily consented to provide medical information and donate blood and saliva. This procedure was approved by the local Ethics Committee of the University Hospital of Erlangen, Germany. Throughout the entire hypervaccination schedule HIM did not report any vaccination-related side effects. From November 2019, to October 2023, 62 routine clinical chemistry parameters showed no abnormalities attributable to hypervaccination (appendix 1 tab 2). Furthermore, HIM had no signs of a past SARS-CoV-2 infection, as indicated by repeatedly negative SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests, PCRs and nucleocapsid serology (figure A; appendix 1 tab 1).
I don't know, maybe they just gave him a break on the charges in exchange for cooperating with the study. You know the scientists would try to pull something like that to study a unique case if at all possible, and I know I would "actively and voluntarily consent" to that if my alternative was jail.
That'd be super unethical and they point out it passed their IRB so that's unlikely to have been the case. I believe their system is like the US where the docs/pharmacies are reimbursed for each dose given so the prosecutors likely were doing basic fraud detection and saw that 100+ doses were associated with the same person which lead them to investigate -- it's probably not illegal to get hundreds of vaccinations hence the lack of charges and it just so happened to have provided an interesting data point for researchers.
Fair point about the ethics angle. I guess. Personally I think it's morally fine (clearly a win-win for him and society) but it does look like coercion and there's a case for avoiding "even the appearance of evil"...
Without being crass, I can definitely see a world in which someone showing up to do something they know they’re not meant to do, interacting with a nurse (likely female, likely in a uniform), and getting a small but manageable amount of pain being a fetish thing.
You're getting downvoted for this, but there were people who actually developed a fetish for intranasal stimulation back when covid testing was still common (and presumably many more who joked about it - see "nussy").
Big mistake and with respect you're uninformed and wrong here.
If he's not convicted then your statement is an accusation of guilt. A false accusation is defamation and it's damaging to the aggrieved party.
False accusations are both harmful to the target and risky for the person making them.
You don't need to be a jury or judge to care about this, for these reasons the AP style guide and practically every journalism outlet takes this matter very seriously.
Now maybe it's 2024, you're a rando from the other side of the world on the Internet and you just do what a billion other social media randos do and you run your mouth. You think your speech doesn't really matter because in practice if you're wrong neither of you is likely to be affected, so you don't need to hold yourself to this standard.
OK fair enough. But if your speech is junk that doesn't matter, why did you open your mouth in the first place? Do us all a favor and if you're going to promote the idea that casual defamation is fine, keep it shut.
People commenting online are generally giving their opinions, not making statements of fact. Statements of opinion are not defamatory. My opinion is that given the evidence in the article, this guy was probably was selling fake vaccination passports. I also hold the opinion that OJ Simpson is probably a murderer, despite his criminal acquittal.
News organizations generally try to split their coverage into fact and opinion sections. It would be inappropriate to insert opinion into a factual article, but they can and frequently do weigh in on legal matters in opinion sections. The bar for defamation there is usually actual malice, so in reality it's extremely hard to prevail in suing a news organization for defamation.
> Evidence for 130 vaccinations in a 9 month period was collected by the public prosecutor of Magdeburg, Germany, who opened an investigation of this case with the allegation of fraud, but criminal charges were not filed.
Given the amount of information they gathered about him, it seems likely that if he was doing something illegal, they would have worked it out and charged him, I guess? It seems like an odd thing to do for “personal reasons” as they say in the paper. But the pandemic was a weird event for everybody, maybe it induced odd behavior or something like that. It is hard to say.
I would tend to assume that the person’s motivation is less interesting to the researchers, and getting into it could distract from the research. Plus, who knows, maybe Germany just has really strict ethical and personal medical laws, so the researchers could just want to avoid that whole minefield.
It sounds like he just wanted to get a lot of vaccinations and used blank cards to not arouse suspicion from the person administering the vaccine and stamping the card.
This is such a no brainer. The article states he has official records of 134 vaccinations.
They wont just keep stamping the same card endlessly until it is completely covered. How else is he going to accomplish this absurd undertaking but to have access to a bunch of official vaccination documents?
It's not outside the realm of possibility that he was also selling them, but I feel like Occam and Hanlon both agree that unless there is direct evidence, he's probably not some criminal mastermind getting rich. He's just a random person with either a fetish or something to prove.
Most explanations I can think of would involve an anxiety, delusional, memory, or cognitive disorder. Or an art project, scientific self-experimentation, or an deliberate effort to experience an adverse reaction in order to qualify for a vaccine injury payment?
[ Edit: Wow, I didn't even think of the fraud possibility mentioned in other comments. :-( :-( In some places maybe people are also directly paid to receive vaccines? ]
I wonder if there's anyone for whom 217 total lifetime vaccine doses (cumulative across various vaccines) would be considered medically indicated. Maybe if you got childhood vaccines on an inefficient schedule, moved around between countries with different recommendations, got a bunch of travel or special occupational hazard or special exposure risk immunizations, eventually got multi-dose old age vaccine series, and also got the annual flu shot every year?
Oh, I guess if you go to both the northern and the southern hemisphere every year, you could have two different annual flu shots indicated (since the hemispheres have different flu shot formulations). I think that could do it when combined with the other stuff.
So, I'm glad that these researchers investigated the case, and reported their findings, but I am not surprised. It would be odd if our immune system, as had apparently been speculated, became less effective against pathogens that it saw a lot. People who live in low-tech areas with, for example, a lot of malaria, will need to have immune systems that remain vigilant, year after year.
Moreover, if a pathogen is in general circulation, a person might easily be exposed to it many, many times in a few years, as you keep coming into contact with people who have it. I would be surprised if it caused the immune system to no longer respond.
More plausible would be that something about the vaccine itself might become less effective, since it is after all not an actual pathogen but rather a piece of one which we are attempting to "trick" the immune system into treating like a pathogen. I believe the term for this part of a vaccine is "adjuvant" (although IANAImmunologist). Most of the vaccinations appear to be mRNA based, if I am reading the appendix of the Lancet article correctly, so it is interesting to see evidence that this method remains "convincing" to the immune system (n=1).
> I would be surprised if it caused the immune system to no longer respond.
I wonder if overfitting to Covid epitopes would cause proliferation of Covid recognition at the expense of other recognition?
Moreover, I wonder if it could lead to overwhelming activation, recruitment, and inflammation in the presence of weakened Covid virus (low dose, environmental background) that would ordinarily be cleared?
But allergens are not pathogens, we are looking at substantially different immune pathways and function (allergens have no lifecycle, let alone one involving host cells).
>Apparently some infections (at least dengue) are worse the second time.
There is some compelling evidence to suggest it is specifically having a low, but not zero, level of antibodies that paradoxically increases the chance of severe infection in dengue fever specifically. Possibly by enhancing dengue's ability to infiltrate cells when it is only slightly coated with antibodies [1]. So even in this rather unusual case, it is not seeing dengue a lot, but rather seeing it exactly once and then seeing it again after several years without any contact that appears to cause this issue.
I agree it's not an absurd idea. But it would be surprising.
I think there's a lot left to discover about how our immune system misfires to cause allergies, but it is worth pointing out that allergens don't reproduce, so the idea would be that if your immune system has enough exposure it will eventually figure out that it's not a pathogen.
But you're correct, it's not an absurd idea, just would have been surprising if true.
It's especially prevalent in respiratory viruses. The flu is a well known case. The more flu shots you have (the yearly one), the less effective they become (while still more effective than nor having one).
That only happens in cases where the disease rapidly evolves. Which is the case for COVID, though not to the same degree as the flu, which has its genome split into 8 distinct RNA's which mutate and also get shuffled up when multiple viruses infect the same cell.
Just to clarify a bit of confusion here ... Covid infections do not expose you to additional mRNA.
The mRNA is an instruction sequence used to trick a small number of your cells into producing small virus parts for a short amount of time. For example "produce a covid spike protein." It's harmless to the cells to produce a few useless proteins like this, and the resulting proteins train your immune system to recognize covid.
It's not harmless to the cells, otherwise there would be no killer T-cell response elicited by the vaccine. I'm not sure what percent of cells get killed, but it's absolutely not zero. It codes for the whole (but genetically modified) spike as well. The CDC saying something does not make it true.
That's incorrect. The immune response is to simple fragments of the covid virus -- which is literally how all traditional vaccines work. The only difference with mRNA vaccines is that instead of giving you a single shot of virus fragments, the new vaccines convince your own cells to product those fragments over a period of a day or two.
Your comment suggesting that the CDC is lying is both ridiculous and also confused about which government body approves vaccines.
Cells display samples of proteins they replicate on their exterior, your immune system samples them and if it sees something that isn’t right T-Cells kill the cells that exhibit replication of foreign proteins.
This is part of how our immune system detects and defeats viral threats in addition to say anti-bodies which attack free viral particles but are useless against infected cells.
So as long as the vaccine involves any sort of replication such as in the case of mRNA or live attenuated viruses then there will be an immune response that would include some cellular damage.
That said the damage is very minimal and most likely within the margin of error of cells that are killed by your immune system anyhow.
Epidemiology of 20 million+ vaccine recipients in Australia shows that heart issues related to the vaccine are extremely rare and almost always cause a response within a short time of vaccination.
Given 200+ vaccinations and no sign of falling over yet .. it seems pretty darn unlikely based on observations to date.
As spondylosaurus notes, the chances of heart issues within the decade are very likely just what they were regardless of the vaccine shots.
>There is official confirmation for 134 of these vaccinations.
I admit that I sometimes also come to the comments first, and then check out the link. But I've never understood why so many people on here ask questions that are answered in the linked article...
> The man who has now been examined by researchers at FAU claims to have received 217 vaccinations for private reasons. There is official confirmation for 134 of these vaccinations.
Can we please as a rule avoid reposting reddit reposts of 4chan shitposts? This is not why I come to HN. It would sadden me if this ever became normalized.
Please avoid trolling on hn. Larping as an uneducated racist anti-vaxxer who still doesn't understand vaccines counts as trolling, so please just don't do it. Thank you.
Because I assume that on hn, most people are familiar with the fact that the vaccine makes it a lot less likely to get the disease, and decreases the symptoms if you do get it.
Also, people who are not trolling typically don't use the expression "Kung-Flu", since I would expect that even anti-vaxxers usually have enough self-respect not to parrot the embarrassing utterings of a certain former US president.
But since it is impossible to assert that a very committed troll is actually a troll, let's pretend you are an honest person, and actually asking if people believe that you need 217 vaccines to get complete immunity from COVID.
Let's even steel-man your argument, and pretend you understand how vaccines work, understand herd immunity, and therefore did not mean complete immunity.
I once wondered if a way to avoid Covid, for healthcare workers and the likes would be to have constant exposure. For example, by working, unprotected and on a day to day basis around covid patients just after recovery from an initial infection (and later, vaccine).
The idea is to stimulate the immune system constantly to not let the virus have any chance. While the virus and vaccine are not the same, the fact that the body seems to not have a problem with constant exposure could make it an idea not as dumb as it may seem.
71 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] thread> Here, we report on a 62-year-old male hypervaccinated individual from Magdeburg, Germany (HIM), who deliberately and for private reasons received 217 vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 within a period of 29 months (figure A; appendix 1 tab 1). HIM's hypervaccination occurred outside of a clinical study context and against national vaccination recommendations. Evidence for 130 vaccinations in a 9 month period was collected by the public prosecutor of Magdeburg, Germany, who opened an investigation of this case with the allegation of fraud, but criminal charges were not filed. 108 vaccinations are individually recorded and partly overlap with the total of 130 prosecutor-confirmed vaccinations (appendix 2 p 12). To investigate the immunological consequences of hypervaccination in this unique situation, we submitted an analysis proposal to HIM via the public prosecutor. HIM then actively and voluntarily consented to provide medical information and donate blood and saliva. This procedure was approved by the local Ethics Committee of the University Hospital of Erlangen, Germany. Throughout the entire hypervaccination schedule HIM did not report any vaccination-related side effects. From November 2019, to October 2023, 62 routine clinical chemistry parameters showed no abnormalities attributable to hypervaccination (appendix 1 tab 2). Furthermore, HIM had no signs of a past SARS-CoV-2 infection, as indicated by repeatedly negative SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests, PCRs and nucleocapsid serology (figure A; appendix 1 tab 1).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Without being crass, I can definitely see a world in which someone showing up to do something they know they’re not meant to do, interacting with a nurse (likely female, likely in a uniform), and getting a small but manageable amount of pain being a fetish thing.
What are you trying to say?
(1) He wasn't actually trying to selling vaccine cards?
(2) He was trying to selling vaccine cards but hadn't yet succeeded?
Given the evidence — the confiscated cards and the sheer number of shots already administered — both (1) and (2) seem like absurd presuppositions.
We're not a jury, and this is not a trial. We can't send him to jail, but we can say he's clearly guilty as hell.
Big mistake and with respect you're uninformed and wrong here.
If he's not convicted then your statement is an accusation of guilt. A false accusation is defamation and it's damaging to the aggrieved party.
False accusations are both harmful to the target and risky for the person making them.
You don't need to be a jury or judge to care about this, for these reasons the AP style guide and practically every journalism outlet takes this matter very seriously.
Now maybe it's 2024, you're a rando from the other side of the world on the Internet and you just do what a billion other social media randos do and you run your mouth. You think your speech doesn't really matter because in practice if you're wrong neither of you is likely to be affected, so you don't need to hold yourself to this standard.
OK fair enough. But if your speech is junk that doesn't matter, why did you open your mouth in the first place? Do us all a favor and if you're going to promote the idea that casual defamation is fine, keep it shut.
News organizations generally try to split their coverage into fact and opinion sections. It would be inappropriate to insert opinion into a factual article, but they can and frequently do weigh in on legal matters in opinion sections. The bar for defamation there is usually actual malice, so in reality it's extremely hard to prevail in suing a news organization for defamation.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
> Evidence for 130 vaccinations in a 9 month period was collected by the public prosecutor of Magdeburg, Germany, who opened an investigation of this case with the allegation of fraud, but criminal charges were not filed.
Given the amount of information they gathered about him, it seems likely that if he was doing something illegal, they would have worked it out and charged him, I guess? It seems like an odd thing to do for “personal reasons” as they say in the paper. But the pandemic was a weird event for everybody, maybe it induced odd behavior or something like that. It is hard to say.
I would tend to assume that the person’s motivation is less interesting to the researchers, and getting into it could distract from the research. Plus, who knows, maybe Germany just has really strict ethical and personal medical laws, so the researchers could just want to avoid that whole minefield.
They wont just keep stamping the same card endlessly until it is completely covered. How else is he going to accomplish this absurd undertaking but to have access to a bunch of official vaccination documents?
It's not outside the realm of possibility that he was also selling them, but I feel like Occam and Hanlon both agree that unless there is direct evidence, he's probably not some criminal mastermind getting rich. He's just a random person with either a fetish or something to prove.
From the AP story: "German police have conducted many raids in connection with forgery of vaccination passports in recent months."
This wasn't just an isolated case or idle speculation. People were selling them, regardless of whether this particular individual did.
> he's probably not some criminal mastermind getting rich
Of course not. He was a dumb petty criminal who got caught, just like countless other dumb petty criminals in the world.
I think you underestimate the power of neuroses. Good chance no money was involved.
Neurosis was my initial theory, before I discovered the news articles mentioned in the submission. "They learned of his case via newspaper reports."
[ Edit: Wow, I didn't even think of the fraud possibility mentioned in other comments. :-( :-( In some places maybe people are also directly paid to receive vaccines? ]
I wonder if there's anyone for whom 217 total lifetime vaccine doses (cumulative across various vaccines) would be considered medically indicated. Maybe if you got childhood vaccines on an inefficient schedule, moved around between countries with different recommendations, got a bunch of travel or special occupational hazard or special exposure risk immunizations, eventually got multi-dose old age vaccine series, and also got the annual flu shot every year?
Oh, I guess if you go to both the northern and the southern hemisphere every year, you could have two different annual flu shots indicated (since the hemispheres have different flu shot formulations). I think that could do it when combined with the other stuff.
Moreover, if a pathogen is in general circulation, a person might easily be exposed to it many, many times in a few years, as you keep coming into contact with people who have it. I would be surprised if it caused the immune system to no longer respond.
More plausible would be that something about the vaccine itself might become less effective, since it is after all not an actual pathogen but rather a piece of one which we are attempting to "trick" the immune system into treating like a pathogen. I believe the term for this part of a vaccine is "adjuvant" (although IANAImmunologist). Most of the vaccinations appear to be mRNA based, if I am reading the appendix of the Lancet article correctly, so it is interesting to see evidence that this method remains "convincing" to the immune system (n=1).
I wonder if overfitting to Covid epitopes would cause proliferation of Covid recognition at the expense of other recognition?
Moreover, I wonder if it could lead to overwhelming activation, recruitment, and inflammation in the presence of weakened Covid virus (low dose, environmental background) that would ordinarily be cleared?
This definitely deserves more study.
This is how allergy treatments work.
Apparently some infections (at least dengue) are worse the second time.
So it's not an absurd idea.
But allergens are not pathogens, we are looking at substantially different immune pathways and function (allergens have no lifecycle, let alone one involving host cells).
>Apparently some infections (at least dengue) are worse the second time.
There is some compelling evidence to suggest it is specifically having a low, but not zero, level of antibodies that paradoxically increases the chance of severe infection in dengue fever specifically. Possibly by enhancing dengue's ability to infiltrate cells when it is only slightly coated with antibodies [1]. So even in this rather unusual case, it is not seeing dengue a lot, but rather seeing it exactly once and then seeing it again after several years without any contact that appears to cause this issue.
[1] - https://www.statnews.com/2017/11/02/dengue-second-infection/
I think there's a lot left to discover about how our immune system misfires to cause allergies, but it is worth pointing out that allergens don't reproduce, so the idea would be that if your immune system has enough exposure it will eventually figure out that it's not a pathogen.
But you're correct, it's not an absurd idea, just would have been surprising if true.
That actually can happen. It's called "original antigenic sin" or "immunological imprinting".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin
It's especially prevalent in respiratory viruses. The flu is a well known case. The more flu shots you have (the yearly one), the less effective they become (while still more effective than nor having one).
Still, I'm sure the amount of mRNA he was exposed to is only a fraction of the amount the body is exposed to during a severe Covid infection.
The mRNA is an instruction sequence used to trick a small number of your cells into producing small virus parts for a short amount of time. For example "produce a covid spike protein." It's harmless to the cells to produce a few useless proteins like this, and the resulting proteins train your immune system to recognize covid.
Your comment suggesting that the CDC is lying is both ridiculous and also confused about which government body approves vaccines.
Cells display samples of proteins they replicate on their exterior, your immune system samples them and if it sees something that isn’t right T-Cells kill the cells that exhibit replication of foreign proteins.
This is part of how our immune system detects and defeats viral threats in addition to say anti-bodies which attack free viral particles but are useless against infected cells.
So as long as the vaccine involves any sort of replication such as in the case of mRNA or live attenuated viruses then there will be an immune response that would include some cellular damage.
That said the damage is very minimal and most likely within the margin of error of cells that are killed by your immune system anyhow.
Katalin Karikó deserved her 2023 Nobel Prize for that invention.
Given 200+ vaccinations and no sign of falling over yet .. it seems pretty darn unlikely based on observations to date.
As spondylosaurus notes, the chances of heart issues within the decade are very likely just what they were regardless of the vaccine shots.
And ten years? You would think he would die instantly at this dose.
>There is official confirmation for 134 of these vaccinations.
I admit that I sometimes also come to the comments first, and then check out the link. But I've never understood why so many people on here ask questions that are answered in the linked article...
Almost as if viruses had not already been the cause of deaths in the past.
Is that a some kind of "natural can't be bad" stance?
Although that is not certain with the corona virus.
Well hold on. Only 134?
Perhaps I missed it but it seems like a large part of the focus was on whether or not that many vaccinations had damaged his immune response.
In January and February 2022, he went almost twice a day, every day!
Also, people who are not trolling typically don't use the expression "Kung-Flu", since I would expect that even anti-vaxxers usually have enough self-respect not to parrot the embarrassing utterings of a certain former US president.
But since it is impossible to assert that a very committed troll is actually a troll, let's pretend you are an honest person, and actually asking if people believe that you need 217 vaccines to get complete immunity from COVID.
Let's even steel-man your argument, and pretend you understand how vaccines work, understand herd immunity, and therefore did not mean complete immunity.
Then the answer is: "no"
217 is not the needed number.
The idea is to stimulate the immune system constantly to not let the virus have any chance. While the virus and vaccine are not the same, the fact that the body seems to not have a problem with constant exposure could make it an idea not as dumb as it may seem.