The Truth about Vitamin D and COVID-19 [View all]

[SidDithers]

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-health/truth-about-vitamin-d-and-covid-19

The most important fact that is often overlooked is that these supplements have been studied and do not work.

I am often asked if there is a simple way to prevent or cure COVID-19. I can assure you there is not. If there were, I would not have sat casually by as millions of people around the world got sick and died. Not being a Bond villain, I derive no pleasure from wide-scale human suffering, nor do I enjoy not being able to see my friends. I don’t endorse any vitamin or mineral as a COVID cure because they simply do not work.

You will, if you wade through the morass of misinformation on the internet, find many posts and videos advocating for zinc, Vitamin C or Vitamin D as COVID cures. They promise to simultaneously prevent infections, cure the disease, save lives and thereby make lockdowns and vaccines unnecessary.

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But the most important fact that is often overlooked is that these supplements have been studied and do not work. The COVID A to Z Randomized Trial tested ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), zinc and a combination of the two as a treatment for COVID-19. Between April and October 2020, researchers recruited patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and randomly assigned them to receive nothing, zinc, Vitamin C or both. Neither zinc, nor Vitamin C, nor the combination, improved symptoms, the risk of hospitalization or the risk of death. As the accompanying editorial pointed out, these two supplements failed to live up to their hype.

Vitamin D is another popular supposed COVID cure, though many of its claims to reduce heart disease or cancer have not panned out. I was willing to entertain the possibility that it might work for COVID-19. But the only published trial about Vitamin D and COVID-19 shows that it does not. Researchers in Brazil randomized hospitalized COVID patients to get either a placebo or 200,000 units of Vitamin D. This is a massive dose and 20 times higher than what most people take per week. For those patients, their blood levels of Vitamin D went up. They just didn’t get better any faster. Admission to the ICU, being put on a ventilator and mortality were the same in both groups.

From the excellent McGill University Office of Science and Society.

Sid