Twitter vs. Substack Notes, Elon Musk vs. Matt Taibbi and the immune system's dependence on vitamin D
We need a great communicator to tackle deadly, closed, patterns of thought.
Corruption, malevolence and tribal, madness-of-crowds animosity have a profound impact on everything, since they reduce most people’s ability to learn what they need to know, by suppressing, hiding and misrepresenting pertinent discussions. So does ordinary groupthink - the natural tendency to think that all the people whose opinions we agree with, really have got it right and that alternatives to their understanding of reality are not worth listening to.
The importance of having at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D is clear to those few who are familiar with the research: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/.
The challenge is to bring doctors, immunologists, public health officials and the mainstream media up to speed on this.
Ideally, we would have a consensus statement by the world’s leading vitamin D researchers and clinicians (some are both) which answers the simple question: “How much vitamin D3 to take?” with the daily quantity being a ratio of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity, since they have difficulty converting vitamin D3 to 25-hydroxyvitamin D and retaining the latter. New Jersey based Emeritus Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa wrote an article on this last year, in Nutrients: Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19. The ratios are summarised at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#sjw-updated-ratios. Prof. Wimalawansa’s article also recommends and explains the need for a single oral dose of 0.014 mg calcifediol (which is 25-hydroxyvitamin D) to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels safely over 50 ng/mL in four hours, in clinical emergencies such as sepsis, COVID-19 or any other acute illness in people whose levels are too low.
The barriers to this being known to all of humanity are primarily in the minds of doctors and immunologists, who generally find it hard to imagine that most people’s immune systems are crippled through lack of any nutrient.
Those who understand the immune system’s need for more vitamin D than most people ingest or make in their skin need a lot of help raising awareness of this.
Medical doctors have high defenses against anyone trying to convince them to think differently. For fear of being considered a (sound made by ducks) many are understandably averse to thinking or stating something which challenges mainstream medicine. Government moves to control doctors - including their ability to discuss alternatives to the mainstream consensus and government policy - make this groupthink much worse.
I recently gave a doctor my one page flyer (PDF and PNG):
with the Boston hospital graph showing post-operative infection rates rising drastically the further pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels were below 50 ng/mL. I explained the graph and she said this was interesting and that she would take a look a the research at that page. If most doctors were prepared to consider that mainstream medicine might have overlooked the importance of nutrients, such as vitamin D3, information like this would spread rapidly among them and most people would be much better nourished, healthier and happier.
Vitamin D advocates need help. I can easily imagine Matt Taibbi boldly raising awareness of this.
Elon Musk vs. Matt Taibbi
He wrote a great article on his Substack, which has its own domain name: www.racket.news/p/meet-the-censored-me
The second half of the article is only available to subscribers. I subscribed to his Substack in the past - and subscribed again today, for a year, because I think he does such great work. At the end of the article he describes his recent falling out with Elon Musk. The background is:
Twitter is a tremendously important site for exchanging ideas in brief format - 280 characters plus images and videos. Journalists and all sorts of people with something to say find it a vital way of learning about what’s up and raising awareness of whatever they think is important. (I subscribe to Twitter for the latter reason, and to support ideally uncensored social media which depends less, or not at all, on advertising which favours click-bait and outrage.)
Twitter has for years been biased against those who question the mainstream, left-leaning narrative in politics and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic response.
Elon Musk bought Twitter outright for USD$44B in order to improve its support for the free exchange of ideas, to make money and to build it into a larger set of functions, including payment systems.
The left-leaning mainstream media has been pitching a fit since then, taking every opportunity to portray Twitter as failing and/or becoming a hot bed of hate speech. Watch an overconfident young man (James Clayton), from woke-compliant government broadcaster the British Broadcasting Commission, accuse Elon Musk, face-to-face, of allowing the growth of hate speech on Twitter, including tweets which are “slightly racist, slightly sexist” - and coming unstuck when he can’t cite a single example:
twitter.com/CensoredMen/status/1646075238378098688
33.6M views in 24 hours.
In late 2022, Elon Musk opened up Twitter’s “dirty laundry” records to investigators, including especially Matt Taibbi, to report on the previous management's acceptance and support of systematic, formal (but secret), user-specific and broad-brush influence on Twitter's content moderation by US government agencies and by supposedly independent non-profits which were in fact partly funded by the US government. This is the Twitter Files investigation. Matt Taibbi summarized the first month of these reports, to 2023-01-05, here. Wikipedia has an updated summary.
In the last few years, startup Substack has enabled many people to write without fear of censorship, and so reach readers who are genuinely interested in whatever they have to say. Substack supports long-form articles and lively, thoughtful, discussion in the comments, which are not appropriate or possible in other systems - especially Twitter: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/substack-supports-extraordinarily .
A week ago, Substack announced a short-form Substack Notes system substack.com/notes, apparently modeled on Twitter, for real-time exchanges to complement its subscription based, Substack articles system.
A few days ago, Elon Musk / Twitter accused Substack of trying to draw Twitter users into this competing system, and suppressed all tweets linking to Substack articles. Such tweets could not be liked, would not appear in notifications and could not be found in the search system, though all these constraints except the search suppression have since been lifted.
The contradiction of freedom-of-speech Twitter suppressing a similarly free-speech, much smaller, competitor - rather than competing normally, such as by improving Twitter - is a real brain burner. Matt Taibbi wrote on “the WTF week to end all WTF weeks”.
The Vitamin D Awareness Mission
A year or two ago Matt Taibbi asked his Substack subscribers to suggest topics worth investigating. I didn't write then about vitamin D and the immune system, but today I wrote a comment in the above article suggesting a new mission. He's very busy, but it doesn't hurt to ask:
Hi Matt, We need complex, hierarchical systems to run things like airlines, healthcare, the Internet, Substack and Twitter. Some of these are run by private enterprise and the rest by governments - potentially parasitic entities, one of which grows in every country - which forcibly monopolize the ability to print money, make laws, arrest, detain and kill.
The overall task is to prevent the all-too-often corrupt, malevolent and/or dim-witted people who run these things from fucking things up for everyone. Elon Musk's attempt to obliterate Substack shows he can be part of the problem, as well as the solution.
This task extends to the mainstream medical profession, which has acceded to and supported the mandatory administration of poorly tested, dangerous, ineffective mRNA and adenovirus vector quasi-vaccines for COVID-19, withholding numerous safe, effective, *inexpensive* and so unprofitable early treatments for COVID-19 https://c19early.org and to government control of doctor’s care for their patients and ability to discuss this freely.
A little known aspect of the systemic failures of mainstream medicine is that most doctors do not understand the immune system's complete dependence on adequate levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, made in the liver from ingested or UV-produced vitamin D3.
In the fullness of time, your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to accelerate the awareness - among the public and the medical profession - of most people's need for proper vitamin D3 supplementation so they attain at least the 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L, 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the bloodstream which their immune systems need to work properly. Currently most people only have 1/10th to 1/2 this. This leads to 11 million people dying every year from sepsis https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32989-7, to pandemic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, to almost all of the deaths from these diseases, and to a plethora of other forms of ill-health.
There's very little vitamin D3 in food, fortified or not, so a "balanced" diet doesn't help. Ultraviolet B skin exposure can produce sufficient vitamin D3 to raise 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels (hydroxylation is mainly in the liver) to at least 50 ng/mL, but this always involves DNA damage and so raise the risk of skin cancer. This is only naturally available from high elevation sunlight on cloud-free days, without being blocked by glass, clothing or sunscreen. Those with dark or black skin would need this kind of exposure over much of their body, most days, to build up enough 25-hydroxyvitamin D to be healthy.
Vitamin D3 supplements are the only practical way of getting most people's immune systems to work properly. Fortunately, intakes up to every 10 days are fine and the required quantities are minuscule. For 70 kg 154 lb body weight without obesity, 0.125 milligrams (5000 IU) a day is sufficient. This is a gram every 22 years and pharma-grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram ex-factory.
Overall, humanity needs about a tonne a day. So this is USD$1B a year plus the cost of splitting it into small capsules or tablets to be taken every week to 10 days. No amount of healthcare, drugs or vaccines can bring everyone to good health as long as their immune system is crippled by inadequate 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.
Your awesome curiosity, skills, achievements, principles, work-ethic, and both good and trenchant humor make you especially suited for this mission. Furthermore, your wife is a medical doctor who can help you navigate and assess the veracity of the most pertinent research on vitamin D and the immune system: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ (Co-signed by Patrick Chambers MD, Hawaii.)
Money-sucking vampire squids are fingerings compared to the corrupted groupthunk ineptitude which holds the majority of the medical profession in its clutches - and so the health of all humanity.
This blindness to body’s need for more vitamin D than most people get today is in stark contrast to the frequently brilliant work by bright, hard-working, well-intentioned doctors and nurses. Hardly anyone can imagine most of them could be overlooking anything so important - but they are. The same happened with handwashing and the dangers of smoking.
The vampire squid reference is to Matt Taibbi's 2010-04-05 Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs The Great American Bubble Machine.
I have to say this: THANK YOU SIR, cause I now have the right levels of vitamin D because of having read your articles and in that case you have improved my life in a simple measurable way. I had one of the best healthy winters ever because of getting the quantity right, helped my family and passed the message along.
A very simple message but a gift that keeps on giving!
Vitamin D is crucial. But it's also problematic. What's the correct dose? For how long? Many people do not have access to blood testing to measure their D level, so how do those folks keep their D levels adequate?
Everyone wears clothes and most people also wear sunscreen, so most are not getting ANY Vit D unless they are supplementing. Those who do make it a point to get outside wearing minimal clothes and no sunscreen may not be aware that if the sun angle is low, say below 40 degrees above the horizon, there's insufficient UV for the skin to manufacture D. Those living at 35 degrees latitude or higher have several months of the year when it's impossible to manufacture D in the skin because the sun angle is too low.
And finally, older people do not manufacture D in the skin as efficiently as younger people. That is, the ability of the skin to manufacture D declines with age.