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It's proactive, not reactive treatment for a disease. It's part of being healthy in the first place, which prevents developing severe COVID, cancer, heart disease, respiratory infection, stroke, diabetes, and death. It's like a car, you give it oil and maintenance to prevent engine damage, you don't give it oil to fix engine damage.

Acting like binging on Vitamin D is supposed to suddenly cure any of those diseases is a complete misunderstanding how all this works. You can greatly reduce your likelihood of severe COVID and 100 other serious/fatal diseases through simple lifestyle changes, but they're not cures for those diseases. And fixing vitamin D deficiency shouldn't mean you take more pills, it should mean you get more exercise out in the Sun.

Also, if vitamin D deficiency is an underlying cause of severe COVID, that would explain the enormous racial inequality for hospitalization and deaths rates. All these things are linked to the amount of melanin in one's skin. The hospitalization and death rates for COVID are double for people with Native American and African blood, and both groups have much higher rates of Vitamin D deficiency.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

https://www.cdc.gov/nutritionreport/pdf/Second%20Nutrition%2...

Right, but the GP-linked study disagrees with your assertion:

“ We now have results for over 1500 RCTs on Vitamin D supplementation. Some of the largest and most significant trials are listed and summarized at the end of this article. When tested on its ability to prevent disease, Vitamin D has failed to live up to expectations."

So no, it does not seem to work

The 1500 RCT's are actually only 31 studies from what I can see. Those studies are do not all overlap either, they are all over the spectrum (D3 and flu, D3 and mortality, D3 and having children with Asthma).

While good sources for specifics, there is a lot of wiggle room for follow up in some of these spaces where the results amount to a single study.

I think the summaries speak for themselves:

> "Vitamin D ... ... did reduce cancer death by 16%"

> "Vitamin D did not reduce the risk of cancer"

Seems like more research is needed here in these specific areas along with what exact version of D3 we are talking about (they are not all manufactured or extracted the same) and if supporting nutrients/lifestyles effect anything.

I think the article just makes the good point that D3 isn't the magic bullet to any and all sickness without really being able to specify with a high level of certainly what it does help with.

Part of the issue is that many vitamin and other health indicators are highly correlated with other things like income status, race, and other significant conflating factors.

D3 also is related to being outside , which would influence the means of infection: lower initial viral load changes outcome.

Actually yes, it does seem to work at least to a limited extent. Maybe do a little more research instead of relying on a single study.

https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/

The title is quite something. The part that made it here seems reasonable enough, as it can be understood as "higher D3 levels help in not dying as much as with lower D3 levels" which is possible.

The other half is "a Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved at 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D3" which the abstract argues for because "Regression suggested a theoretical point of zero mortality at approximately 50 ng/mL D3."

Someone sent in the clowns. (after that abstract I'm not sure I want to check out the details)

I agree, that they even have a dosage at which they predict zero deaths is nothing short of ludicrous. It gives away that they authors are unqualified.

Why not go one further, and suggest Lazarus-like effects at 100 ng/mL?

>after that abstract I'm not sure I want to check out the details

There's a fairly short review of why the study is kinda silly here: https://gidmk.medium.com/vitamin-d-covid-19-and-the-promise-...

That article is just a load of snark. It starts off my claiming that Vitamin D is suggested as a cure for all kinds of things, but the science shows that low Vitamin D levels are correlated with various diseases. There is a huge difference between saying low levels should be avoided in order to reduce disease and claiming that there is a cure. Not being able to tell the difference shows a lack of interest or understanding in the basic science involved. Railing against purported false claims is a rhetorical tactic and it is worth noting there are no citations for any of the claimed cure claims.

And the science involved is quite complex as recent studies have suggested that people can become resistant to Vitamin D in a way that mirrors insulin sensitivity. This means that serum levels vary in ways that are very much not directly related to supplementation, especially dietary supplementation.

In any case getting distracted by the "Regression SUGGESTED a THEORETICAL zero point of mortality ..." remark doesn't make sense because even Vitamin D enthusiasts rarely sustain levels much above 40.

Wow, the concept of "Vitamin D Resistance" is truly fascinating. Thanks for sharing this.

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/605/

D3 (and a bunch of other vitamins) might just be a proxy for simply good nutrition or even just wealth. If your D3 levels are alright, maybe everything else in your health is alright?

yes, I think you are onto something, for ever research paper they need to properly disentangle and normalize the various effects - controlling the factors.

Sounds like disentangling vitamin D levels is much more difficult than say controlling for social status, or income, age etc.

Yep. Now is that related to overall wealth of people with low vit-d. Or is it linked to other factors like genetic heritage?

The extreme low cases of vit-d in developed nations tends to have a genetic component or other health thing. But the genetic link I think has been disentangled from overall affluence. I.e. certain people if they take vit-d supplements can improve their overall health.

Its certain correlated with disability. Those who are chronically ill wont be getting out into the sun as much and tend to have low Vitamin D. It is a well known proxy for overall health.

Yes, but unfortunately there is a genetic element which has been disentangled with regard to vitamin d production otherwise. I.e. certain minorities in the developed world have good otherwise health but poor vit-d due to the production being related to absorbed sunlight through the skin

There are relatively few dietary sources of Vitamin D, fatty fish and fortified foods being the main sources. It is quite possible to eat a healthy diet and be deficient in Vitamin D if you do not eat these foods. The principal source of Vitamin D is exposure to sunlight on bare skin and people at northern latitudes cannot get sufficient exposure during the winter.

The statement is broadly that this is not intended as a treatment but offers a useful way of deciding how likely a patient is to not respond to initial therapy.

I don't think a sensible person is suggesting a massive dose of vitamin d on a arrival is a cure.

As for the consequence of is the deficiency linked to poor otherwise health that is interesting to disentangle.

This does offer a very good explanation to the idiotic statements of "covid is racist". I.e. if it is linked to vit-d deficiency it offers a way to reduce deaths in minorities. These early concerns suggested that covid would hit Africa for instance really badly, and it is yet to do so.

Several studies indicate that a massive dose of vitamin D on arrival reduces symptoms.

https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/

RCTs are great, but they are almost always underpowered when studying nutritional deficiencies.

For the cited study, the cancer incidence rate was 1.2% in 5 years among 12500 recipients. That's barely 150 patients. Getting statistically significant effects with such low sample sizes is very difficult.

We will have to live with correlational instead of causal studies for nutrition. If you are interested, smoking causes lung cancer hypothesis was based on correlation- which was how cigarette manufacturers attacked the hypothesis. Proving a causal connection between smoking and cancer is much more difficult.

https://towardsdatascience.com/correlation-does-not-imply-ca...

The studies mentioned are for supplementation. I'd be interested to see studies on vitamin D benefits through sunlight exposure instead. It may be that these studies are proving not that increasing vitamin D levels can prevent disease, but that supplementation is ineffective.

Depression & mental illness too. At least that's why my doc said and had my levels tested.

The vast majority of people infected with Sars-CoV2 do not need to cure COVID, as they do not even notice any symptoms.

> The vast majority of people infected with Sars-CoV2 (...) do not even notice any symptoms.

Not true. It has been estimated that asymptomatic COVID-19 represents at most around 35% of the cases.

* https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

* https://www.sciencealert.com/over-a-third-of-covid-infection...