Each day brings anguish as we all witness our people dying from this virus. Trump obviously enjoys watching Americans die — it’s a psychopath’s jolly after all. He enjoys our helplessness and the chaos it creates.
However, I believe we are not helpless. There is something all of us can do to improve our chances of surviving COVID. Wearing masks is an obvious one. This pandemic has made the usual slow careful processes of science have to speed up and depend upon clinical observations without being able to control variables without the potential for causing harm — it is the nature of emergencies.
However, there are observations that doctors have been making that may lead us to the conclusion that taking a daily (or even weekly) Vitamin D capsule might help us survive.
Almost half the population is Vitamin D deficient. The demographics of Vitamin D deficiency tracks closely with the demographics of those most vulnerable to Covid:
50% of the population has vitamin D insufficiency.[1] The prevalence of patients with vitamin D deficiency is highest in the elderly, the obese patients, nursing home residents, and hospitalized patients…Vitamin D deficiency may be related to populations who have higher skin melanin content and who use extensive skin coverage, particularly in Middle Eastern countries.
Obesity increases the need for Vitamin D supplementation because the Vitamin D needs to top off fat cells before it increases blood levels. (There is even question as to whether or not Vitamin D deficiency itself might be a cause of obesity.) The elderly spend more time indoors, have thinning skin, and have less efficient metabolism.
Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin produced on the skin through sunlight exposure. Melanin reduces the efficiency of this synthesis; there is a danger with too much vitamin D. Thus, human skin color evolved as an adaptation to calibrate and delimit Vitamin D synthesis for any given location. Northern latitudes have weaker sunlight, thus vitamin D synthesis in pale skin is more efficient. Sunbathing with sunscreen does little to increase your daily dose, and most people simply wash all that Vitamin D off (it is synthesized on the surface, not the subsurface skin layers) after sweating in the sun.
Evidence that Vitamin D aids the body’s ability to fight off respiratory viruses has been accumulating for a while. Vitamin D also protects vascular endothelium, one of the most devastating targets of Covid. Vitamin D also plays a role in cardiovascular disease, another major risk factor in Covid.
It is being noticed that Vitamin D deficiency appears to be associated with greater mortality with Covid. Vitamin D seems to play a role in suppressing the cytokine storm that kills patients. One Indonesian study showed that 98.9% of the patients that died from Covid were Vitamin D deficient.
New studies are showing that Vitamin D has a synergistic effect upon the body’s production of Interferon; this action is involved in modulating the immune response. It is worth noting that Interferon is now being studied as a possible treatment for Covid.
Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and zinc are included in a treatment protocol for Covid.
Physicians such as Dr John Campbell in the UK (see May 9 and June 20 updates) and Dr Sehuelt (MedCram — see Update #83) in Los Angeles have repeatedly mentioned the importance of Vitamin D in Covid-19 disease progression in their excellent YouTube video lectures.
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There is much more literature on this subject. Although Vitamin D is not a silver bullet — nothing is yet — still, anything that has the potential to reduce the suffering of this disease is worth doing. Dosage information can be found in this quote:
Evidence supporting the role of vitamin D in reducing risk of COVID-19 includes that the outbreak occurred in winter, a time when 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) concentrations are lowest; that the number of cases in the Southern Hemisphere near the end of summer are low; that vitamin D deficiency has been found to contribute to acute respiratory distress syndrome; and that case-fatality rates increase with age and with chronic disease comorbidity, both of which are associated with lower 25(OH)D concentration. To reduce the risk of infection, it is recommended that people at risk of influenza and/or COVID-19 consider taking 10,000 IU/d of vitamin D3 for a few weeks to rapidly raise 25(OH)D concentrations, followed by 5000 IU/d. The goal should be to raise 25(OH)D concentrations above 40–60 ng/mL (100–150 nmol/L). For treatment of people who become infected with COVID-19, higher vitamin D3 doses might be useful. Randomized controlled trials and large population studies should be conducted to evaluate these recommendations.
In sum, I beg of you, my friends, to please begin to take a daily dose of Vitamin D if you aren’t already. Just one large dose will not help; you will need to sustain the intake at a high level (10,000IU) for a few weeks to bring it up if you think you might be deficient but then level it off at a good, safe daily dose (5000 IU). We want and need for every one of you, your families, and friends to stay alive and healthy if at all possible.
