Agreed, but not sure how you're counting. The first crime against humanity was the lab leak, so every COVID-attributed death is on their hands. If the lab leak was an accident, it's still on their hands for lack of safety precautions and the research shouldn't have been allowed. #2 is suppression of early treatment. It likely doesn't add to the total, but it provides a second reason why they are responible in +-80% of the case. #3 is lockdown. Here you probably have to add in the excess non-COVID death figures. #4 is the mass vaccination campaign, maybe those numbers are already in the excess death, in which case like #2, they are another reason to lay the blame at Fauci's feet. COVID-attributed and non-COVID excess deaths together have to be approaching 10 million, absolutely the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.
I bundled multiple distinct but interrelated crimes against humanity, as you list - lockdowns, quasi-vaccines being falsely promoted and forced on people, lack of care for quasi-vaccine-injured, ongoing censorship of views contrary to the official narrative, curtailing freedoms of medical professionals, suppression of early treatments etc. into a large "pandemic response" cluster of such crimes, which I numbered "2" in my chronologically ordered system.
I am just stating how I think about these, which is subject to change. I wouldn't argue about how they are categorised - just that they be fully recognised, that those responsible be held accountable, and that we all learn and change whatever is needed to reduce the risk of anything like these reoccurring.
I am happy to report that I have taken more interest in vit D3 because of your work. I got tested recently, and the doc assured me that the test was normal. I requested a copy, and it turns out I am only at 37, which is barely above deficient. Good to know, and thank you for alerting me that I should raise it to about 50.
A very important post, thank you. I heartily advocate Vitamin D for Covid to any and all in my circles who will listen.
That said, the table from c19early.com doesn't put Vit D in a very favorable light (RR of 0.57), and therefore I would caution against using it. If I recall correctly, the table significantly understates the effectiveness of Vit D because it lumps together trials featuring sufficient dosing with trials that involved inadequate dosing. A curious reader might come across this table and wonder if D is after all really as useful as most of the rest of your article says. At the very least, some discussion of those seemingly middling results would seem to be in order as they seem to run against the thrust of the rest of your article.
The key to understanding why "vitamin D" is the most important nutritional intervention against COVID-19 (before infection) and for numerous other diseases and health problems, while at the same time not being recognised as such in most RCTs, can be found in a proper understanding of the immune system's need for at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. According to the best research to date, this is needed to ensure strong innate and adaptive responses to cancer cells and to bacteria, fungi and viruses - and to reduce the risk of wildly dysregulated, self-destructive inflammatory responses. The most pertinent research on vitamin D3 and its two derivative compounds 25-hydroxyvitamin D and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D is cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ . Please read this - and look at the research itself rather than taking my word for anything. (This page is co-signed by Patrick Chambers MD - so it is not just what I think is important.) It will take you a day or more, but I can't very well summarise it in comments, or even in whole Substack articles.
The primary reason for these overly inflammatory responses is individual genetic variations on a long-evolved overly-inflammatory response, which is no longer down-regulated by helminths (intestinal worms): https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/#02-helminths. Typical 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels of 50 to 25 ng/mL make these inflammatory responses much worse. (I don't know of any vitamin D researchers who, so far, take any interest in helminths.)
Assuming someone has just been diagnosed with COVID-19, sepsis, Kawasaki disease etc. and has a 25-hydroxyvitamin D level of, say, 20 ng/mL, their immune system cannot fight the virus as well as it would with 50 ng/mL or more. The most urgent need of all is to boost this level. Ordinary healthy daily intakes of vitamin D3 take months to attain this. A bolus dose of 10 mg (400,000 IU) vitamin D3 takes, for 70 kg body weight, very approximately 4 days due to the delays inherent in its need to be hydroxylated in the liver. (Actually, about 1/4 of ingested vitamin D3 is hydroxylated to the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune and other cell-types need.) This is far too slow, though it can reduce harm, hospitalisation and death to a significant extent.
Looking at the RCTs listed in the Early Treatment section of https://c19early.org/dmeta.html, only one has a decent vitamin D3 intake of 10 mg (400,000 IU). In the Late Treatment section, a few more have a proper intake. But this is all to slow - due to the (very approximately) 4 day delay in raising 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
In that Late Treatment section, three RCTs used a single oral dose of 0.532 mg calcifediol followed by half this three days later, and half this at days 7, 14 etc. It is the first dose which is by far the most important. Calcifediol _is_ 25-hydroxyvitamin D. This initial dose will raise many people's 25-hydroxyvitamin D over 50 ng/mL. These are "Castillo", "Alcala-Diaz" and "Nogues" - all from Cordoba, Spain. The Castillo RCT involved spectacular results: ICU admissions reduced from 50% to 2% and deaths from 8% to zero. However, some of this benefit was due to imperfect randomisation - more severe cases happened to be in the control group. Nonetheless, this was tremendous success. The other two RCTs were done later, with much more complex and hard to analyse control groups, at a time when the population was widely using calcifediol outside the trials.
The Maghbooli RCT in Iran involved 0.025 mg calcifediol per day for 30 days. This does almost nothing to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the few hours - which is what everyone needs at any stage of the disease, especially if their symptoms are so severe that they are hospitalised.
As a preventive of severity, and to suppress average viral shedding (and to some extent the chance of being infected at all), the standard for vitamin D is long-term supplementation to attain at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. That would stop (in all, or almost all settings) pandemic transmission and make serious harm and death a rare outcome in those infected - especially if early treatment is also provided.
If the 25-hydroxyvitamin D is pitifully low at infection - which is the case then and now for the great majority of the population - the proper way to use "vitamin D" as an early treatment is to not to use vitamin D3, but to give a single oral dose of 0.014 mg per kg body weight of calcifediol, and to support this 4 boost, for _everyone_, of 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels safely over 50 ng/mL with ongoing vitamin D3 or smaller doses of calcifediol. (Vitamin D3 is easiest and best, since it may have some immune support functions of its own, at least in some endothelial cells: Gibson et al. 2015 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140370.)
This is approximately twice the amount of calcifediol as used in the Cordoba RCTs. This is what should have been done for everyone whose 25-hydroxyvitamin D level was reasonably assumed to be lower than 50 ng/mL. (It would not harm anyone with higher levels, unless those levels were very high - such as 150 ng/mL or more, which is very hard to attain - and so posed some risk of long term toxicity. Even then, the short duration of the calcifediol intake is unlikely to cause any harm.) The only peer-reviewed article to recommend this calcifediol early treatment is Prof. Sunil Wimalawansa's https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997 . This recommendation of his, and a somewhat earlier version of his vitamin D supplemental intake quantities as ratios of body weight, are included in some of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care's protocols: https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/ .
This is not hard to understand - unless perhaps you are a doctor or an immunologist, most of whom have no serious interest or proper understanding of 25-hydroxyvitamin D and the immune system.
If this calcifediol early treatment was provided for every newly infected COVID-19 patient, very few would have died, assuming the few still seriously affected had decent hospital care and ideally some of the early treatments. The medical profession could have and would have recognised this very rapidly after the Castillo preprint was released at the end of August 2020, if they had been interested, if they could have imagined that 25-hydroxyvitamin D was so important to the immune system, and if they were less fixated on so-called vaccines and other expensive, patented, treatments. None of these conditions were true for the vast majority of doctors. Most of them are captive to extreme groupthink,, since most are extremely unwilling to even contemplate information which is contrary to what they believe most other doctors think is true.
Critical care doctors could have figured this out long ago regarding sepsis, which killed 11 million people in 2017 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32989-7/fulltext - but again, the interest of the vast majority of the medical profession is in more complex, supposedly sophisticated, treatments - rather than giving the body its proper operating conditions.
The annual death toll from sepsis may be greater than the total death toll from COVID-19 so far. While some of the cause of this ignorance about the immune system's need for 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D can be attributing to the best vitamin D researchers failing to clearly explain its use in intracrine and paracrine signaling, and their failure so far to produce a consensus statement on body weight ratio based vitamin D supplemental intake quantities and the above calcifediol treatment, if most doctors - or even a fair fraction of leading doctors - were as interested in these matters as they should be, they would have read the research, told others about it and figured all this out years ago - for sepsis, and so for Kawasaki disease and severe influenza, and now COVID-19 and MIS-C.
It could be argued that this failure to properly understand, recommend and use vitamin D for sepsis and other conditions is an egregious failing and so a crime against humanity. If an electronic technician and computer programmer can figure it out, why can't the leaders of the world's ten million or so doctors? Multinational pharmaceutical companies have played a role in this by unreasonably disparaging vitamin D: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v14n22.shtml.
Thank you for the extensive and well-referenced reply! You have given me a lot to chew on.
In your research, have you come across estimates of the amount of time needed to let one's D level drop? I had a routine medical exam a couple of weeks ago; I happened to mention to the doctor that my D level was 71, and immediately he prescribed a blood test for D "to make sure that it's not too high." Rather than get into an argument over the safe level of D, I would like to time the blood test to a suitable interval after dropping my D3 daily intake from 5000-10,000 IU to 1000 IU, with the idea of raising it back as soon as the blood is drawn.
(Please see the new first section at the top of this article, on supporting doctors so they can work well.)
If your 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D or calcifediol - "calcidiol" is another term which I think is confusing and best avoided) level is 71 ng/mL (177 nmol/L) and you want to let it drop to about 2/3 of this, I suggest not taking any vitamin D3 for a while.
The half-life of 25(OH)D in the bloodstream, which is coupled to some of it being in tissue and perhaps the liver (non-human animals store some there - I am not sure about humans) varies with the level.
There is a self-regulatory system for removing 25(OH)D by hydroxylating it at the 23rd carbon, with that compound being broken down. The enzyme molecules which do this are more numerous and so active at higher levels, which is why there is not a straight line, but one which rolls off, in graphs such as: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#ekwaru .
So the half-life at higher levels is shorter than, for instance, at 20 ng/mL. I can't think of any references which tell us what we want to know here. I guess if you delay your test for 6 weeks you might get down to 40 to 50 ng/mL, but this is a guess of an electronic technician and computer programmer.
Ideally you would get your doctor to understand why you are happy with 71 ng/mL. My level is something like this - surely above 60 and probably below 100 ng/mL. I am 70 kg and take 1.25 mg 50,000 IU a week. I recently went to the doctor and took an annotated printout of the first graph from https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ to help me explain why I take what she may have thought was a dangerous amount of vitamin D.
I will take another such printout when I soon see a new doctor, to get an all over skin inspection for signs of cancer or other trouble. Here in Australia this is widely accepted as essential to avoiding skin cancer. Some doctors do nothing but these skin inspections - with camera images of the whole body, and by looking for changes from the last visit 6 months before.
I spent a lot of my childhood in direct sun at the local swimming pool - with not much in the way of sunscreen. My siblings did the same and I think all of them have had things which needed to be removed. This is why I don't suggest trying to get most of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D we need from vitamin D3 generated by UV-B skin exposure.
Thank you for introducing me to vitamin D via your website. It was a springboard into further reading of research articles. Of course one has to separate wheat from chaff when reading.
Low quality articles rely on 1) inadequate dosing, 2) inadequate followup, or 3) failure to test starting baseline vitamin D levels.
Even high quality articles will be imperfect due to the nature of vitamin D research--it is inevitable that some trial subjects will break protocol if they discover that they are deficient in vitamin D.
They have average body weight and BMI for the subjects in each dosage group and the plot both individual results and trend lines. I will read it with great interest and mention it on the NISH list: https://nish.groups.io. You and anyone else who has a serious interest in research into nutrition and the immune system are cordially invited to join us!
As far as I know, this sort of thing was standard procedure in the analysis of quasi-vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and death. I don't recall looking at any such mainstream report about such effectiveness and seeing that they properly separated those who were un-quasi-vaccinated, those who had had an injection in the last 14 or 21 days, and those who had had one or more such injections, with their most recent one being more than 14 or 21 days ago.
According to the article you linked to, the Swedish analysis counted people who were injected, for their first or second such injection, as "unvaccinated" if they died between 0 and 14 days after their most recent injection. This is not explicable as any degree of incompetence. It is fraud.
To the extent that most or all other such estimates, in other countries, of quasi-vaccine effectiveness against death, or hospitalisation (or, earlier on, symptomatic or PCR-detected infection), all other such estimates were fraudulent and all commercial and government efforts to encourage or coerce people to accept such quasi-vaccines were fraudulent or at least egregiously incompetent. Likewise the related attempts to persuade or force people not to use nutritional support and/or inexpensive, well-tested, early treatments.
This fraud and/or egregious incompetence harmed and killed thousands to millions of people, directly and indirectly.
The scale and interwoven nature of these crimes against humanity, involving the majority of multiple classes of professional, in dozens of countries at once, raises several difficulties.
Firstly, most people cannot imagine that so many experts could be so wrong, all together.
Secondly, trying to even roughly outline a few details and the broad scope of these failures - as I have attempted here - is tiresome to the point where most people couldn't be bothered reading it.
In both these problems, the ordinary person and the experts themselves face a crucial test: Can they individually or collectively detect a gross failure of the entire system? For most people - professionals and those they serve - the answer is "No".
Consequently, they continue to support the false consensus beliefs and actions of their professional groups and of whole governments. Their failure to successfully conduct due diligence on these groups and governments, leads to them supporting the faulty positions of these and so becoming a crucial part of the problem which is in fact harming and killing them.
The argument made by pro-jabbers is that the jab isn't effective against disease until 14 days post jab. Yet if the jab induces immune incompetence within the 14 days, this must be tracked. This requires a separate immune category for tracking purposes.
So, the foxhole-"no man's land"-bunker analogy is helpful. The foxhole (unjabbed) has baseline risk. "No man's land" (14 day period) has heightened risk v baseline. The bunker ("fully vaccinated") may have reduced risk v baseline, at least for a while.
What questions need answering?
1. What is the risk for the unjabbed?
2. What is the total risk for the jabbed?
3. What is the risk for the "fully vaccinated"?
The answers to question 2 have been studiously avoided by public health/pharma.
Robin, you write: "A significant proportion of critics of the COVID-19 pandemic response attribute such disastrous harm largely or entirely to people in positions of power and influence who acted with deliberate intent to harm and kill. I argue that a lot of the harm was done by rank-and-file professionals, who did not set out to harm or kill."
If you said, "I argue that a lot of the harm was done by rank and file professionals who did not set out to harm or kill, while also recognizing that there has been a smaller but not insignificant group with influence outsizing (is that a word?) their numbers who acted out intentional harm, and often swayed the former." -- then I would be entirely in your camp.
Please note that Solzhenitsyn also said that Stalin's massive purges in Leningrad would have gone very differently if a small group of men assembled each evening in the foyers of apartment buildings with clubs and axes, and went after the police-thug coming in to arrest someone. Just disappearing a few of them might have stopped the entire operation.
Agreed, but not sure how you're counting. The first crime against humanity was the lab leak, so every COVID-attributed death is on their hands. If the lab leak was an accident, it's still on their hands for lack of safety precautions and the research shouldn't have been allowed. #2 is suppression of early treatment. It likely doesn't add to the total, but it provides a second reason why they are responible in +-80% of the case. #3 is lockdown. Here you probably have to add in the excess non-COVID death figures. #4 is the mass vaccination campaign, maybe those numbers are already in the excess death, in which case like #2, they are another reason to lay the blame at Fauci's feet. COVID-attributed and non-COVID excess deaths together have to be approaching 10 million, absolutely the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.
I bundled multiple distinct but interrelated crimes against humanity, as you list - lockdowns, quasi-vaccines being falsely promoted and forced on people, lack of care for quasi-vaccine-injured, ongoing censorship of views contrary to the official narrative, curtailing freedoms of medical professionals, suppression of early treatments etc. into a large "pandemic response" cluster of such crimes, which I numbered "2" in my chronologically ordered system.
I am just stating how I think about these, which is subject to change. I wouldn't argue about how they are categorised - just that they be fully recognised, that those responsible be held accountable, and that we all learn and change whatever is needed to reduce the risk of anything like these reoccurring.
I am happy to report that I have taken more interest in vit D3 because of your work. I got tested recently, and the doc assured me that the test was normal. I requested a copy, and it turns out I am only at 37, which is barely above deficient. Good to know, and thank you for alerting me that I should raise it to about 50.
A very important post, thank you. I heartily advocate Vitamin D for Covid to any and all in my circles who will listen.
That said, the table from c19early.com doesn't put Vit D in a very favorable light (RR of 0.57), and therefore I would caution against using it. If I recall correctly, the table significantly understates the effectiveness of Vit D because it lumps together trials featuring sufficient dosing with trials that involved inadequate dosing. A curious reader might come across this table and wonder if D is after all really as useful as most of the rest of your article says. At the very least, some discussion of those seemingly middling results would seem to be in order as they seem to run against the thrust of the rest of your article.
Thanks very much for your appreciation.
The key to understanding why "vitamin D" is the most important nutritional intervention against COVID-19 (before infection) and for numerous other diseases and health problems, while at the same time not being recognised as such in most RCTs, can be found in a proper understanding of the immune system's need for at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. According to the best research to date, this is needed to ensure strong innate and adaptive responses to cancer cells and to bacteria, fungi and viruses - and to reduce the risk of wildly dysregulated, self-destructive inflammatory responses. The most pertinent research on vitamin D3 and its two derivative compounds 25-hydroxyvitamin D and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D is cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ . Please read this - and look at the research itself rather than taking my word for anything. (This page is co-signed by Patrick Chambers MD - so it is not just what I think is important.) It will take you a day or more, but I can't very well summarise it in comments, or even in whole Substack articles.
The primary reason for these overly inflammatory responses is individual genetic variations on a long-evolved overly-inflammatory response, which is no longer down-regulated by helminths (intestinal worms): https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/#02-helminths. Typical 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels of 50 to 25 ng/mL make these inflammatory responses much worse. (I don't know of any vitamin D researchers who, so far, take any interest in helminths.)
Assuming someone has just been diagnosed with COVID-19, sepsis, Kawasaki disease etc. and has a 25-hydroxyvitamin D level of, say, 20 ng/mL, their immune system cannot fight the virus as well as it would with 50 ng/mL or more. The most urgent need of all is to boost this level. Ordinary healthy daily intakes of vitamin D3 take months to attain this. A bolus dose of 10 mg (400,000 IU) vitamin D3 takes, for 70 kg body weight, very approximately 4 days due to the delays inherent in its need to be hydroxylated in the liver. (Actually, about 1/4 of ingested vitamin D3 is hydroxylated to the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune and other cell-types need.) This is far too slow, though it can reduce harm, hospitalisation and death to a significant extent.
Looking at the RCTs listed in the Early Treatment section of https://c19early.org/dmeta.html, only one has a decent vitamin D3 intake of 10 mg (400,000 IU). In the Late Treatment section, a few more have a proper intake. But this is all to slow - due to the (very approximately) 4 day delay in raising 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
In that Late Treatment section, three RCTs used a single oral dose of 0.532 mg calcifediol followed by half this three days later, and half this at days 7, 14 etc. It is the first dose which is by far the most important. Calcifediol _is_ 25-hydroxyvitamin D. This initial dose will raise many people's 25-hydroxyvitamin D over 50 ng/mL. These are "Castillo", "Alcala-Diaz" and "Nogues" - all from Cordoba, Spain. The Castillo RCT involved spectacular results: ICU admissions reduced from 50% to 2% and deaths from 8% to zero. However, some of this benefit was due to imperfect randomisation - more severe cases happened to be in the control group. Nonetheless, this was tremendous success. The other two RCTs were done later, with much more complex and hard to analyse control groups, at a time when the population was widely using calcifediol outside the trials.
The Maghbooli RCT in Iran involved 0.025 mg calcifediol per day for 30 days. This does almost nothing to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the few hours - which is what everyone needs at any stage of the disease, especially if their symptoms are so severe that they are hospitalised.
As a preventive of severity, and to suppress average viral shedding (and to some extent the chance of being infected at all), the standard for vitamin D is long-term supplementation to attain at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. That would stop (in all, or almost all settings) pandemic transmission and make serious harm and death a rare outcome in those infected - especially if early treatment is also provided.
If the 25-hydroxyvitamin D is pitifully low at infection - which is the case then and now for the great majority of the population - the proper way to use "vitamin D" as an early treatment is to not to use vitamin D3, but to give a single oral dose of 0.014 mg per kg body weight of calcifediol, and to support this 4 boost, for _everyone_, of 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels safely over 50 ng/mL with ongoing vitamin D3 or smaller doses of calcifediol. (Vitamin D3 is easiest and best, since it may have some immune support functions of its own, at least in some endothelial cells: Gibson et al. 2015 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140370.)
This is approximately twice the amount of calcifediol as used in the Cordoba RCTs. This is what should have been done for everyone whose 25-hydroxyvitamin D level was reasonably assumed to be lower than 50 ng/mL. (It would not harm anyone with higher levels, unless those levels were very high - such as 150 ng/mL or more, which is very hard to attain - and so posed some risk of long term toxicity. Even then, the short duration of the calcifediol intake is unlikely to cause any harm.) The only peer-reviewed article to recommend this calcifediol early treatment is Prof. Sunil Wimalawansa's https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997 . This recommendation of his, and a somewhat earlier version of his vitamin D supplemental intake quantities as ratios of body weight, are included in some of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care's protocols: https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/ .
This is not hard to understand - unless perhaps you are a doctor or an immunologist, most of whom have no serious interest or proper understanding of 25-hydroxyvitamin D and the immune system.
If this calcifediol early treatment was provided for every newly infected COVID-19 patient, very few would have died, assuming the few still seriously affected had decent hospital care and ideally some of the early treatments. The medical profession could have and would have recognised this very rapidly after the Castillo preprint was released at the end of August 2020, if they had been interested, if they could have imagined that 25-hydroxyvitamin D was so important to the immune system, and if they were less fixated on so-called vaccines and other expensive, patented, treatments. None of these conditions were true for the vast majority of doctors. Most of them are captive to extreme groupthink,, since most are extremely unwilling to even contemplate information which is contrary to what they believe most other doctors think is true.
Critical care doctors could have figured this out long ago regarding sepsis, which killed 11 million people in 2017 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32989-7/fulltext - but again, the interest of the vast majority of the medical profession is in more complex, supposedly sophisticated, treatments - rather than giving the body its proper operating conditions.
The annual death toll from sepsis may be greater than the total death toll from COVID-19 so far. While some of the cause of this ignorance about the immune system's need for 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D can be attributing to the best vitamin D researchers failing to clearly explain its use in intracrine and paracrine signaling, and their failure so far to produce a consensus statement on body weight ratio based vitamin D supplemental intake quantities and the above calcifediol treatment, if most doctors - or even a fair fraction of leading doctors - were as interested in these matters as they should be, they would have read the research, told others about it and figured all this out years ago - for sepsis, and so for Kawasaki disease and severe influenza, and now COVID-19 and MIS-C.
It could be argued that this failure to properly understand, recommend and use vitamin D for sepsis and other conditions is an egregious failing and so a crime against humanity. If an electronic technician and computer programmer can figure it out, why can't the leaders of the world's ten million or so doctors? Multinational pharmaceutical companies have played a role in this by unreasonably disparaging vitamin D: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v14n22.shtml.
Thank you for the extensive and well-referenced reply! You have given me a lot to chew on.
In your research, have you come across estimates of the amount of time needed to let one's D level drop? I had a routine medical exam a couple of weeks ago; I happened to mention to the doctor that my D level was 71, and immediately he prescribed a blood test for D "to make sure that it's not too high." Rather than get into an argument over the safe level of D, I would like to time the blood test to a suitable interval after dropping my D3 daily intake from 5000-10,000 IU to 1000 IU, with the idea of raising it back as soon as the blood is drawn.
As an example, this page (https://www.uspharmacist.com/article/vitamin-d-supplementation-an-update) states that the half-life of serum calcidiol is 15 days. Does that jibe with what you have seen?
(Please see the new first section at the top of this article, on supporting doctors so they can work well.)
If your 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D or calcifediol - "calcidiol" is another term which I think is confusing and best avoided) level is 71 ng/mL (177 nmol/L) and you want to let it drop to about 2/3 of this, I suggest not taking any vitamin D3 for a while.
The half-life of 25(OH)D in the bloodstream, which is coupled to some of it being in tissue and perhaps the liver (non-human animals store some there - I am not sure about humans) varies with the level.
There is a self-regulatory system for removing 25(OH)D by hydroxylating it at the 23rd carbon, with that compound being broken down. The enzyme molecules which do this are more numerous and so active at higher levels, which is why there is not a straight line, but one which rolls off, in graphs such as: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#ekwaru .
So the half-life at higher levels is shorter than, for instance, at 20 ng/mL. I can't think of any references which tell us what we want to know here. I guess if you delay your test for 6 weeks you might get down to 40 to 50 ng/mL, but this is a guess of an electronic technician and computer programmer.
Ideally you would get your doctor to understand why you are happy with 71 ng/mL. My level is something like this - surely above 60 and probably below 100 ng/mL. I am 70 kg and take 1.25 mg 50,000 IU a week. I recently went to the doctor and took an annotated printout of the first graph from https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ to help me explain why I take what she may have thought was a dangerous amount of vitamin D.
Here is my flyer, in two formats:
https://5nn.info/temp/vit-d-flyer/1-page-vitamin-D-flyer-00.png
https://5nn.info/temp/vit-d-flyer/1-page-vitamin-D-flyer-00.pdf
I will take another such printout when I soon see a new doctor, to get an all over skin inspection for signs of cancer or other trouble. Here in Australia this is widely accepted as essential to avoiding skin cancer. Some doctors do nothing but these skin inspections - with camera images of the whole body, and by looking for changes from the last visit 6 months before.
I spent a lot of my childhood in direct sun at the local swimming pool - with not much in the way of sunscreen. My siblings did the same and I think all of them have had things which needed to be removed. This is why I don't suggest trying to get most of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D we need from vitamin D3 generated by UV-B skin exposure.
Very well-said overall.
Thank you for introducing me to vitamin D via your website. It was a springboard into further reading of research articles. Of course one has to separate wheat from chaff when reading.
Low quality articles rely on 1) inadequate dosing, 2) inadequate followup, or 3) failure to test starting baseline vitamin D levels.
Even high quality articles will be imperfect due to the nature of vitamin D research--it is inevitable that some trial subjects will break protocol if they discover that they are deficient in vitamin D.
The best article which I have found about the effectiveness of vitamin D supplementation in raising levels is https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/0003-4819-156-6-201203200-00005
Hi again Tom,
Thanks very much for your appreciation. I had not seen this article. I am sure I would have remembered it:
"Dose Response to Vitamin D Supplementation in Postmenopausal Women,A Randomized Tria"
J. Christopher Gallagher,Adarsh Sai,Thomas Templin II andLynette Smith.
Annals of Internal Medicine 2012-03-20
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/epdf/10.7326/0003-4819-156-6-201203200-00005 (Paywalled.)
Sc-Hub has it: https://sci-hub.ru/10.7326/0003-4819-156-6-201203200-00005
They have average body weight and BMI for the subjects in each dosage group and the plot both individual results and trend lines. I will read it with great interest and mention it on the NISH list: https://nish.groups.io. You and anyone else who has a serious interest in research into nutrition and the immune system are cordially invited to join us!
"The Trialsite News article stated ". . . the benefits of the immunization program still outweighed the risks"
Jessica Rose's article about the Swedish data demolishes this trope.
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/demystifying-the-swedish-data
As far as I know, this sort of thing was standard procedure in the analysis of quasi-vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and death. I don't recall looking at any such mainstream report about such effectiveness and seeing that they properly separated those who were un-quasi-vaccinated, those who had had an injection in the last 14 or 21 days, and those who had had one or more such injections, with their most recent one being more than 14 or 21 days ago.
According to the article you linked to, the Swedish analysis counted people who were injected, for their first or second such injection, as "unvaccinated" if they died between 0 and 14 days after their most recent injection. This is not explicable as any degree of incompetence. It is fraud.
To the extent that most or all other such estimates, in other countries, of quasi-vaccine effectiveness against death, or hospitalisation (or, earlier on, symptomatic or PCR-detected infection), all other such estimates were fraudulent and all commercial and government efforts to encourage or coerce people to accept such quasi-vaccines were fraudulent or at least egregiously incompetent. Likewise the related attempts to persuade or force people not to use nutritional support and/or inexpensive, well-tested, early treatments.
This fraud and/or egregious incompetence harmed and killed thousands to millions of people, directly and indirectly.
The scale and interwoven nature of these crimes against humanity, involving the majority of multiple classes of professional, in dozens of countries at once, raises several difficulties.
Firstly, most people cannot imagine that so many experts could be so wrong, all together.
Secondly, trying to even roughly outline a few details and the broad scope of these failures - as I have attempted here - is tiresome to the point where most people couldn't be bothered reading it.
In both these problems, the ordinary person and the experts themselves face a crucial test: Can they individually or collectively detect a gross failure of the entire system? For most people - professionals and those they serve - the answer is "No".
Consequently, they continue to support the false consensus beliefs and actions of their professional groups and of whole governments. Their failure to successfully conduct due diligence on these groups and governments, leads to them supporting the faulty positions of these and so becoming a crucial part of the problem which is in fact harming and killing them.
The argument made by pro-jabbers is that the jab isn't effective against disease until 14 days post jab. Yet if the jab induces immune incompetence within the 14 days, this must be tracked. This requires a separate immune category for tracking purposes.
So, the foxhole-"no man's land"-bunker analogy is helpful. The foxhole (unjabbed) has baseline risk. "No man's land" (14 day period) has heightened risk v baseline. The bunker ("fully vaccinated") may have reduced risk v baseline, at least for a while.
What questions need answering?
1. What is the risk for the unjabbed?
2. What is the total risk for the jabbed?
3. What is the risk for the "fully vaccinated"?
The answers to question 2 have been studiously avoided by public health/pharma.
Robin, you write: "A significant proportion of critics of the COVID-19 pandemic response attribute such disastrous harm largely or entirely to people in positions of power and influence who acted with deliberate intent to harm and kill. I argue that a lot of the harm was done by rank-and-file professionals, who did not set out to harm or kill."
If you said, "I argue that a lot of the harm was done by rank and file professionals who did not set out to harm or kill, while also recognizing that there has been a smaller but not insignificant group with influence outsizing (is that a word?) their numbers who acted out intentional harm, and often swayed the former." -- then I would be entirely in your camp.
Please note that Solzhenitsyn also said that Stalin's massive purges in Leningrad would have gone very differently if a small group of men assembled each evening in the foyers of apartment buildings with clubs and axes, and went after the police-thug coming in to arrest someone. Just disappearing a few of them might have stopped the entire operation.