Man Got 87 Doses Of Covid-19 Coronavirus Vaccines Allegedly In Germany

You may be wondering whether you should get your fourth dose of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine and not your 87th dose. No real public health official has recommended that you get 85 boosters. Nevertheless, a 61-year man in Germany has reportedly already been vaccinated at least 87 times against Covid-19, according to Tino Moritz and Tobias Wolf reporting for the Freie Presse.

Now, all of these doses didn’t come in a single sitting or even at the same vaccination center. He didn’t just keep saying, “Thank you, sir, may I have another,” over and over again with the vaccination staff obliging. And before you look at someone about to give you the Covid-19 shot and ask, “are you sure there aren’t 87 doses in that syringe,” this was not a mistake by the vaccination staff. No, instead apparently the man had visited different vaccination centers in the eastern German states of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt on different days to keep getting more and more shots. In fact, on some days, he got as many as three separate shots.

Umm, why would he do such a thing? Well, it wasn’t as if the man was really, really worried about waning immunity. And he didn’t seem to accidentally misunderstand four as 87. Rather, the man allegedly was doing all this for money. Reportedly, each time the man showed up to get vaccinated, he was armed, so to speak, with another blank vaccination document so that the vaccine batch number could be filled in the document after he got the shot. He could then sell these documents to people who wanted to pretend that they had gotten vaccinated and needed faux Covid-19 vaccination records. This scam may have worked, oh the first 80 or so times. But eventually staff members recognized the man, caught on, and notified the police when the man tried to get vaccinated in Eilenburg. This wasn’t surprising because if you are going to get anything over 80 times in a region, chances are you’ll eventually have to make repeat visits to the same location, unless you are talking about a Vanilla Latte at a Starbucks. The German Red Cross has since pressed charges against him.

Notice how the third sentence in this article said “at least 87 times.” That’s because the man logged 87 vaccinations in state of Saxony alone. He could have very well gotten a lot more doses in other German states. The Freie Presse didn’t mention the man’s name or details about his job situation. It’s not clear how much the man was getting for each vaccination record that he was selling. Neither Glassdoor nor Salary.com has “vaccination record card mule” as a listed job title. One would think that there might be easier ways to make money.

Now before you ask what might happen to someone who’s gotten vaccinated 87 times in presumably less than a year, keep in mind that there haven’t been any clinical studies looking at this specific question. Of course, there are those unfounded claims that just one Covid-19 vaccine dose will put a microchip in your body, alter your DNA, turn you into a magnet, or make keys stick to your head. Gee, if any of these were actually true, what the heck would 87 doses do? Would keys be flying towards this man like fans swarming One Direction? Would this man now be able to provide WiFi to all of Germany? Would this man still be a man?

At this point, no one can be 100% sure what so many doses of the Covid-19 vaccine will do to the man, if anything. Typically, you want to wait at least four to six months between Covid-19 doses and not simply four to six hours. Getting another doses too soon after the last dose may not give your immune system long enough to have fully learned from the previous dose and be ready enough to learn from the follow-up dose. Getting boosted too soon may then not offer as much protection as you could have gotten. So it would be interesting to see what kind of protection the man ends up having in the long run.

One thing’s fairly clear though. This man probably can consider himself fully vaccinated at this point. Doctors most likely won’t be recommending that he get another booster anytime soon. This man’s alleged shenanigans did point out flaws in the way that Germany is keeping track of vaccinations and who’s getting vaccinated. An article in DW quoted Knut Köhler, a spokesperson for the Saxony state medical association, as saying, “A national vaccine register or a coronavirus vaccine register would have shed light on the case immediately.” When Germany was setting up its vaccination system, chances are public health officials didn’t say, “we really need to make sure that people don’t get vaccinated over 80 times.” Nevertheless, a national vaccine register could make it easier for businesses and other organizations to verify whether someone has indeed been vaccinated, reduce the utility of fake vaccination record cards, and help keep better track of how many people have been fully vaccinated and boosted. Who knows? Maybe German public health officials may now need to update their count of people who’ve been fully vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19.