Your Vitamin D or your life?
The failure to evaluate and provide simple treatments for COVID may be negligent homicide
The therapeutic response to COVID has been pathetic.
Dismal.
An epic failure.
One could even say negligent.
Almost homicidal.
While many billions of dollars have been spent developing, distributing, and advertising the vaccine, very little attention has been paid to prophylactics or therapeutics.
If you test positive for COVID but only have mild (or no) symptoms, the only recommended treatment is “go home and rest; if it gets worse go the the ER”.
Literally - that is it. No drugs, no advice, not even chicken soup.
Wouldn’t it be great if anybody who tested positive would get a ‘goodie bag’ in the mail containing simple instructions and medications? They have been doing for many months in India: you test positive and you are sent home with blister packs for a full course of Vitamin D and Ivermectin.
Oh sure, if you get severe illness or go to the hospital there are (expensive) therapies: monoclonal antibodies are the best (by far), but there are many others that are used - from steroids to anti-clotting medications.
But what is missing is early, at-home therapies.
The question is simple: Why are there no therapies?
The answer is also simple:
The FDA and CDC have not done the studies. They could have. They did not do their jobs.
Take the new oral medication being touted from Merck (molnupiravir) as an example of what they could do. Merck managed to do a safety study and a Stage 2/3 trials involving 170 countries and 775 unvaccinated patients starting about a year ago (October 19, 2020). That single study of ~375 patients (remember only half get the real drug) will almost certainly be enough to gain FDA approval very, very soon.
The drug is promising - but that is not the point - we should already have similar data on at least 10 other drugs that showed similar benefits in vitro (test tube experiments).
Just a partial list: Vitamin D, hydroxychlorquine, and ivermectin are fairly well known. But there is also budesonide, favipiravir, Vitamin C, zinc, and believe it or not, aspirin. (see https://c19early.com/ for a fairly complete listing of the potentially-helpful drugs and all the [non-FDA] studies associated with them)
We should not be wondering if these drugs work.
We should know whether they work or not.
The reason we do not know is a failure of nearly every level of science, medicine, and government.
Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine both have a 30-plus year track record of safety and low side effects. Both are already FDA approved. Yet the FDA cannot manage to do a single definitive trial on either one?!!? Given the magnitude of the covid threat, this failure should not be possible, is certainly not acceptable, and borders on negligent homicide.
Many of the other drugs I listed are promising, but none of them reach the FDA’s level of acceptable evidence (whatever that may be).
But!
Even if those studies are not sufficient, why aren’t the NIH & CDC sponsoring trials that would definitively show if the drug is helpful or not?!?
Again - scientific malpractice.
They are letting people die instead of doing the tests (or believing the experiments already done by others).
(Perhaps the new drug needs to be a big money maker? Molnupiravir is expected to cost over $700 per dose and require a minimum of 10 doses per patient!)
Since the most promising item on the potentially-helpful list that is available over-the-counter is Vitamin D, let’s go through a bit of the data.
For those who don’t want to keep reading… here is the summary:
TAKE VITAMIN D.
Take it if you are sick, take it if you are feeling fine, take it if you are vaccinated, take it if you are unvaccinated. Take it if you have already had COVID, take it if you have not.
As Nike might say: Just do it!
Virtually every single person who died from COVID was likely deficient in Vitamin D.
Sufficient Vitamin D levels are needed for optimal operation of you immune system. Many, many papers show that low Vitamin D puts you at much greater risk of getting and dying from infections (not just COVID - this is also important, because if the COVID dominance of the virome ends, we will see huge surges in other viral illness like influenza or RSV - Vitamin D should help protect you from any of them).
Now lots of papers show the same thing for COVID: low serum D levels are deadly. (see https://c19vitamind.com/ for a full listing)
This summary of 122 studies suggests strongly that Vitamin D works. Particularly early in an illness. (It also suggests that calcifediol is a better form that cholecalciferol, but anything is better than nothing.)
A peer-reviewed meta-analysis (a paper that analyzes and summarizes many other papers) published just four days ago (https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/10/3596/htm) makes my point perfectly:
“This study illustrates that… patients with sufficiently high D3 serum levels preceding the infection were highly unlikely to suffer a fatal outcome.”
Essentially, symptom length, disease severity, and mortality all got lower and lower as patients’ blood level of D3 got higher and higher - until mortality was zero for those above 50ng/mL.
The good news is that it is relatively difficult to take too much Vitamin D, but people with certain diseases (calcium pathologies, parathyroid problems, some kidney stones or osteoporitic problems, etc) should be very cautious. Plus, the authors are very careful to point out that this study does not show specifically that taking Vitamin D supplements will prevent disease or that taking them after you get sick will help. But…..
What other options do you have???
The government has seemingly made sure we don’t have anything to turn to, except their vaccine.
How about we try health?
Vitamin D could a big part of that.
It is cheap, easy, and readily available.
Just do it!