Friday, February 04, 2022
Covid Update: Vitamin D
I've been mentioning vitamin D as a likely severe-Covid preventative with increasing confidence since April, 2020. Science Tribe representatives have consistently pushed back, adamant that it's woo woo nonsense, that there is "no statistically significant effect" and other such fine tools of motivated incompetence. (Their supporting evidence is always lame, but they refuse to peel that onion any further than the dry skin on the outside which has "vitamin D is not the cure you're looking for" sharpied on it.)
Well here's the latest:
Pre-infection 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 levels and association with severity of COVID-19 illness
"Patients with vitamin D deficiency (<20 ng/mL) were 14 times more likely to have severe or critical disease than patients with 25(OH)D >=40 ng/mL" (14x: 95% CI 4-51; p<0.001)
That alone would be not very interesting if very few people had poor vitamin D status, but alas that's common enough not only to account for many Covid deaths, but to account for nearly all of them. See particularly figure 2:
Remarkably similar to the plot I posted April 2020, and
once again showing that there are essentially no critical (and
very few severe) Covid cases with strong (prior!) vitamin-D status.
(And recall that this study
among others showed it to be a causal and effective intervention,
not merely an indicator of underlying poor health.)
It would seem that most Covid deaths were (and continue to be) easily avoidable. Along with billions of pharma profits, but I digress.
[Update Feb 6: Since multiple people have replied that vit-D status is just a proxy for BMI, I will highlight this excerpt from the above study: "Finally, among patients with a BMI <30, 49.5% have a 25(OH)D <20 ng/mL compared to 63.6% among patients with a BMI >= 30+ (p = 0.07, 2-sided; p = 0.04, 1-sided). The intensity of the correlation between BMI and vitamin D deficiency does not indicate a strong correlation (Crammer's V = 0.117). As a result, 25(OH)D was not, and cannot be, used as a surrogate value for BMI."]