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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

> For reference, 5,000 IU is >800% the FDA daily recommended value.

Unfortunately the daily recommended value was established erroneously and should be much higher. Many research papers mention this. For example:

> The Institute of Medicine recommendation for adults younger than 70 years of age is 600 IU of vitamin D daily. We are told that this would achieve a level of 50 nmol/L in greater than 97.5% of individuals.6 Regrettably, a statistical error has resulted in erroneous recommendations by the Institute of Medicine leading to this conclusion and it might actually take 8800 IU of vitamin D to achieve this level in 97.5% of the population.7 This is a serious public health blunder.

From the 2015 paper, Vitamin D for influenza

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4463890/

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The next paragraph is even more interesting:

> A colleague of mine and I have introduced vitamin D at doses that have achieved greater than 100 nmol/L in most of our patients for the past number of years, and we now see very few patients in our clinics with the flu or influenzalike illness. In those patients who do have influenza, we have treated them with the vitamin D hammer, as coined by my colleague. This is a 1-time 50 000 IU dose of vitamin D3 or 10 000 IU 3 times daily for 2 to 3 days. The results are dramatic, with complete resolution of symptoms in 48 to 72 hours. One-time doses of vitamin D at this level have been used safely and have never been shown to be toxic.8 We urgently need a study of this intervention. The cost of vitamin D is about a penny for 1000 IU, so this treatment costs less than a dollar.

Wow. Why isn't this more prominent on the covid radar?

Nobody makes any money if it turns out to be a good treatment, so nobody will fund the research

Sorry you're getting downvoted for having a healthy sense of cynicism.

could well be true, same can be said of sleep, the few good papers I've read often showed benefits and I don't recall any instances of harm so safe to try, but no money to pay for anything like the volume of research some rare illnesses get.

This is actually very true. There are lots of potential treatments that use generic and non-patentable agents, and very few people are willing to look into it. Zinc is the classic example; some people think it maybe reduces the duration of the common cold. The common cold is one of the main causes of missed workdays. If there's a drug that could make you miss 4 days of work a year instead of 5 days of work a year, it would be worth billions. But nobody is funding studies on zinc, because nobody will be able to capture that saved revenue for themselves. (Zicam did try this; by patenting a nasal administration method and then doing controlled studies with that. If the results were good, then they'd say "it doesn't apply to oral zinc, it only applies to our applicator", and they could have their money. As it turned out, it caused people to permanently lose their sense of smell. I think it helped with their colds, though.)

Zinc's neurotoxic, which is why it permanently damages your sense of smell and also why people are hesitant to take it to cure the common cold.

Interesting. The Zinc supplement that I started taking a couple times of week due to COVID-19 exceeds all upper limits listed on Wikipedia when taken at the recommended daily dose (50 mg).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc#Dietary_recommendations

> In the case of zinc the adult UL is 40 mg/day (lower for children).

> The EFSA reviewed the same safety question and set its UL at 25 mg/day, which is much lower than the U.S. value.

Please be carefull with trace element as supplements, only take it if your doctor agree and don't self-medicate. When i was younger a kid in my school almost killed himself with iron poisoning (well, rather his parents almost killed him).

"Be careful" as "know which number is bigger than the other"

You're right, people should know that 50mg is bigger than 40mg/25mg (at least for a safe prolonged daily limit - single dosage limit might be higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_toxicity ). It's kindergarden level math and still it seems people have trouble with it.

I'm not being ironic, it seems that's a common problem. Maybe explains why the situation got to the point it got.

One problem with zinc is that dosing isn't standardized and people use it in stupid ways, cf. nasal sprays. High concentrations of heavy (-er than calcium) metal ions are of course neurotoxic; putting high concentrations of zinc in direct contact with olfactory tissue is to be avoided. Many supplements contain 50 mg of zinc or more, and worse, people take multiple pills. However, studies show similar effects using only 12.5 mg of zinc:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11073753?dopt=Abstract

Studies using much higher amounts of zinc do not show larger effects than this. The duration reduction in the above study was 28% while studies using 200 mg found a reduction of 35%:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20542704176942...

Simply put, it does not make sense to multiply the dose by a factor of sixteen in order to improve effectiveness by 20%.

Yet I don't know exactly what GP is talking about. There are loads of studies about zinc for the common cold and there are loads of pills on store shelves containing zinc and claiming to treat the common cold. At least here in the United States, that is. People don't take it because of the side effects and the stupid dose forms available (although the situation seems to be slowly improving).

Isn't the US government funding a lot of the medicine/health studies?

I don't know about that. From where I'm sitting, lots of companies stand to gain if Vitamin D turns out to make a big difference. For example: American Airlines, Hilton, and McDonald's.

Not sure I understand why these companies specifically would benefit a new VitD world.

Presumably because they would have customers who weren't quarantined at home unable to purchase goods and services -- any cure is a profitable one for companies not specifically invested in healthcare as a service.

Oddly for me, McDonalds is the one place that's still open 24h around where I live. But yes.

> Wow. Why isn't this more prominent on the covid radar?

How many cases have they seen? N = what value?

Also, in terms of number of studies, it's N = 1.

I'm not saying it's not a good idea. I'm saying let's get more data before we proclaim it from the roof tops.

I've seen one other paper that mentions this:

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202003.0235/v1

There may be others, I haven't really been looking.

I have specifically tried to collect the best papers on this into a detailed report: http://agingbiotech.info/vitamindcovid19/ which has been specifically linked to in this other HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23119949

An interesting thought experiment is would a video showcasing this paper risk being be banned on YouTube? I'm not going to bother checking if the WHO has a Vitamin D recommendation; but recommending many multiples of the FDA dose probably counts as misinformation.

Because the WHO and FDA never got anything wrong...?

No; rather YouTube has taken it upon themselves to decide what the truth is and censor views they believe are wrong. e.g. see this news article: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/04/youtube-ceo-coronav...

--- (Snippet from the article) ---

YouTube's response is now to simply remove videos containing misinformation while previous policies have seen most related content demonetized. Examples provided by the executive include videos claiming that people can be cured by taking vitamin C or turmeric. Neither has been proven to act as a cure according to the wider health community.

Another example of prominent videos that are being removed, she continues, are those related to 5G as an underlying cause. The policy changes, like the rise of those conspiracy theories, have had to be rapid. As a result, for the time being, Videos that contain claims in direct opposition to information provided by WHO will be removed as well.

YouTube hopes that by removing conspiracy theories and misinformation, it can help keep users better informed.

----

While it may squash some of the stupider and more dangerous ideas floating around right now, it tosses the baby out with the bathwater and harms important discussion about whether those in charge right now do actually have their information right.

"While it may squash some of the stupider and more dangerous ideas floating around right now, it tosses the baby out with the bathwater and harms important discussion about whether those in charge right now do actually have their information right. "

Has been always like this with censorship.

I think a more likely reason for a ban would simply be that the Vitamin D connection was being highlighted by lockdown skeptics for quite some time already, as part of investigating the Swedish outcomes. The problem is that to highly liberal Google employees it might look 'racist' because the Vit-D connection came out of trying to figure out why Swedish migrants were over-represented in ICU cases, also African-Americans.

For instance, in this comment from six days ago I write about a possible vitamin D connection:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22968268

If you watch the videos by Dr John Campbell (British public health expert), he talks about Vitamin D all the time. He also expresses his frustration that this isn't given more attention.

Hackernews supports linking to videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCSXNGc7pfs

A lot of us actually know of the connection from previous experiences with the Flu. What it seems to really do is to clear out the cough that comes after the Flu when the cough/sorethroat tends to enter your lungs. With VitaminD, that phase of the flu is gone. I dont supplement regularly, and I start taking it the day I feel I am going down with the flu. No point recommending it because you will be seen as someone who constantly talks of the benefits of VitaminD.

The other thing to make sure of while taking Vitamin D is to take adequate Vitamin K2(menaquinone), else you land up with kidney stones. For continued benefits, I also take some amount of sodium borate and magnesium. Anyway, this is my irregular regimen and you will need to talk to your doc before you do this.

Get tested, meet a doc, get the right dose, and understand how it works.

Doesnt this basically explain the real reason for why flu is worse in winter.

Less sun exposure in general.

I always wondered this too. I didn't think it had anything to do with the temperature of the air... how does that make sense?

Previous thinking was that it was more time spent indoors woth central heating recirculating air and things like that but i never really bought into that idea. Doesnt really work for more temperate climates that still see lots of outdoors activity in winter, eg. Australia.

The one difference is during winter, your basically go to work in the dark and arrive home in the dark as well.

It is.

So... Trump suggesting sunlight as a treatment for COVID-19 may not have been so crazy?

edit: that was a joke, not a very good one I guess.

> "I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there's any way that you can apply light and heat to cure, you know, if you could. And maybe you can, maybe you can't."

He was talking about 2 things

* UV light kills viruses, so why don't you shine UV light into the body to treat the virus

* Many viruses such as the flu don't transmit as well during the summer due to the weather conditions (heat + humidity), so could heat treat the virus in-vivo

Both of those suggestions are ignorant. He very clearly did not mean that getting some sunlight -> Vitamin D will help Coronavirus.

>Many viruses such as the flu don't transmit as well during the summer due to the weather conditions (heat + humidity), so could that treat the virus

Maybe viruses don't transmit as well during the summer because people are outside more and have higher levels of Vitamin D?

I think I read somewhere that in 1918 flu, they noticed that ppl who had lots of exposure to the sun had better outcomes.. anecdotal

FYI, there is an actual company working on a medical device to put UV light inside the body to light the lungs. It's unproven but in the works. It was subsequently censored by Youtube and Twitter after the President's comments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgiHfD_xtvw

Unlike software developers, doctors, in my experience(friends and docs I have gone to), don't seem to have the same open mind about things in their field. At least the one's I know. It might seem foreign to us because a lot of our job is to keep an open mind and constantly question the status quo. Doctors tend to dismiss things immediately and unless you push you won't even get them try something that is harmless. I started going to a primary care physician a decade ago that actually listened, didn't rush me and kept an open mind. He was much younger though. Safe to say though I still go to him. Other doctors young and old that I've been to have not been the same.

That is interesting. As a generality I’ve found software developers to be some of the least open minded people. Perhaps a small bit amongst themselves (though the endless disagreements indicate it’s a very small bit), but when interacting with anyone outside the industry regarding some aspect of the industry, open mindedness is essentially non-existent. Perhaps it is the same for doctors interacting with patients.

This is a general problem in any scenario where you have a high concentration of people with big egos...

Definitely

My mom did her PhD in micronutrients (sorry, I never really asked for details) and has always been nagging me to take 10000 IU of Vitamin D a day. I have been remiss in this over the years, and my physicals always come back with a note about being Vitamin D deficient. I have gotten better and my bloodwork comes back normal these days. (I have never noticed an effect. Coffee has a large effect on whether or not I feel awake, and getting exercise has a large effect on whether or not I feel good. But I'm sure not being deficient in Vitamin D is helping something.)

On the other hand, there's downsides with too much Vitamin D, like hypercalcuria and the risk of kidney stones from that:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5872784/

IIRC, this is for far higher daily dosages (60,000IU a day for 6months).

From my understanding you would need to take an extreme amount for months before you overdose.

I've read a few references that mention taking vitamin K2 together with the Vitamin D makes this a non issue. I don't have a link handy, though.

menaquinone (k2 7)

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