Covid-19 vaccinations are credited by scientists for having prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and brought back a level of normalcy even as the pandemic raged on.
While some netizens (internet users) have doubted their efficiency and even claimed they do more harm than good, one German man might have gone overboard with his Covid-19 vaccine jabs.
Time Magazine reported that a 62-year-old from Germany claimed to have gotten 217 Covid-19 vaccines in just over two years. His case was reported in Lancet Infectious Diseases.
It is unclear how the man circumvented laws and got a lot more vaccines than he needed.
It is said that following news of the man’s unique case, experts from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) got interested and wanted to investigate how the vaccinations affected his immune system.
The man supposedly told researchers he had no side effects from the numerous jabs. He agreed to give the scientists blood and saliva samples and let them look through his medical records to better understand the effect of aggressively stimulating the immune system with the Covid-19 vaccine.
Even during this analysis, the individual sought and got two more doses, despite the advise of the study experts.
“It was unclear in which direction the 200 vaccinations would go. We want to see with multiple vaccinations and booster shots,” Dr Kilian Schober, the leader at the Institute for Clinical Microbiology, Immunology, and Hygiene in Erlangen at FAU was quoted as saying.
Schober and his colleagues are said to compared the man’s immunological responses — measured by his blood antibody levels, the first line of defence against a virus, and T cell levels, which are important for the body’s longer-term response — to those of a control group of 29 persons who had received only three Covid-19 vaccinations.
The scientists hypothesised that the elderly man’s immune response would be similar to that of persons with persistent diseases like HIV or hepatitis B.
This is because when the immune system is repeatedly challenged, immune cells might get overwhelmed and begin to mount weaker responses.
But that was not what they discovered. The man’s antibody levels and effector T cells were six times greater than those in the control group, on average. These high levels indicated that his immune system was powerful.
Schober was quoted as saying, “It made sense. But it was intriguing for us to actually see it in the data.”
Closer to home, on March 6, the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria denied a plea for an injunction directing different governmental agencies to stop providing Covid-19 vaccines.
This came about as a result of three non-profit organisations - Covid Care Alliance, Transformative Health Justice, and Free the Children - Save the Nation - asking for a court order preventing the government from encouraging South Africans to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
Judge Norman Davis stated that it was recognised that some persons had gotten vaccinations and suffered ill health problems that they believed were due to the vaccines but were not scientifically proven.
“Insofar as there had been ‘vaccine related’ deaths, these were in such a minuscule percentage of a total administered vaccine, that they can rightly be labelled ‘extremely rare’. It is clear from the bulk of evidence that the benefits of administering vaccines and obtaining community immunity by far outweigh those instances of adverse events,” said Davis.
IOL