Take Your Vitamins

On today’s show we’re talking about where are we with this darned pandemic that has dominated this year 2020.

There are lots of conflicting data points and individuals, business leaders, public health officials, elected officials, and investors are trying to figure out where this is all heading. This is an area I’ve been studying deeply for a long time.

The Corona Virus is new in the past year, it’s not that well understood to the medical community, and it threatened our global society with a very high mortality rate. We’ve had a bit of a reprieve over the summer months.

The weather is getting cooler and people are spending more time indoors. We are seeing infection rates rising dramatically in many countries including Spain, Israel, France, India and Brazil.

The United States will pass a grim milestone in the next day or so with 200,000 deaths so far this year from the pandemic.

There are some potential vaccines undergoing early clinical trials, and it’s reported that a few hold considerable promise. However, even if these are found to be effective, it will be many more months before they can be manufactured in sufficient quantities and administered to a large enough percentage of the population to have a meaningful impact.

We’re hearing of outbreaks in the school system as children return to school. We’re hearing first hand accounts of outbreaks in university residence buildings.

So where does that leave us? It’s possible that we have a second wave coming. Some point to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which infected 1/3 of the world’s population in four successive waves. It was the later waves of the Spanish Flu that were the most deadly. Is history about repeat itself with the Covid-19 virus?

I’ve been following the work of Dr. John Campbell from the UK. He has been reporting on a number of recent studies showing the correlation between the severity of Covid symptoms and Vitamin D levels. There are numerous studies showing that there is a strong link to severe Covid symptoms and vitamin D deficiency. A recent small scale experiment of 76 patients conducted in Spain showed that out of 50 Covid patients chosen at random who were given the best available treatment and high doses of vitamin D, all survived, and only one out of 50 deteriorated to where they needed to be admitted to intensive care. Out of the remaining 26 cases, all were given the best available treatment, and no vitamin D supplements. From this control group 13 / 26 deteriorated to where they needed intensive care and two died. Fully 50% ended up in intensive care.

You can find the videos from Dr. Campbell on Youtube at https://youtu.be/iNji13yoW9g

Over the past week, Dr. Campbell has presented numerous other papers and studies from the Journal of the American Medical Association, two large scale studies from Israel, to name just a few. It’s strange that the WHO, the CDC, the Oxford Center have not initiated a large scale clinical trial of Vitamin D. But the studies to date seem pretty compelling.

I’ve maintained for a long time that it would take one of two things to bring the pandemic to an end from a social and economic impact.

1) Full herd immunity. Either everyone got it, or large scale deployment of a vaccine

2) An Effective treatment

If you look at the statistics coming from Europe, we see that case counts are rising dramatically. Paradoxically the death counts have not been rising correspondingly. 

It’s too early to declare the pandemic over. Some of the studies have shown Vitamin D to be effective as both preventative and as a therapeutic. Vitamin D is produced within the body by exposure to sunlight. As a supplement, it is readily available, and is easily manufactured in high volume.