A global movement of governments, healthcare professionals and citizens fervently believes vaccines are the only way of restoring former freedoms. They should read the research.
Hi DJ, Thanks for your appreciation! I hadn't noticed that the d.velop price had dropped from USD$30 to USD$20 a bottle of 60 x 0.01mg calcifediol tablets: https://dvelopimmunity.com/products/vitamin-d . The USD$18 is with the default arrangement of recurring orders of 3 bottles every 3 months ("subscription").
I went through the steps of the shopping cart with a California address for 3 bottles and the price was USD$65.70 including taxes, with free shipping within the USA.
I have revised the calcifediol page https://vitamindstopscovid.info/04-calcifediol/ with a new "guidance" section at the start which explains my thoughts on the purposes for which calcifediol should be purchased. I hope this answers your questions. Please comment hear again if not.
Thanks Robin, I have another question. I'm waiting for my results from grassroots but I expect my level will be 50 or above. In the event that I get covert symptoms has your research indicated that it would be good to take 0.5mg to 1.0mg so of 25OHD calcifediol.
Hi Dj, Please remember that my opinion is of no consequence, since I have no medical training. It is up to you what you decide and you may choose to follow the research links I cite here and in my websites as part of your own research.
The benefit of a single oral dose of calcifediol over bolus (single, or over a few days, much larger than normal daily supplemental intake quantity) vitamin D3 cholecalciferol is that the calcifediol, which _is_ 25-hydroxyvitamin D, will boost your circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D in 4 hours or so, vs. some longer period, likely days to a week, with D3, due to D3's need to be hydroxylated in the liver.
The only argument I know of for why having levels higher then 50ng/ml (but still below 150ng/ml, above which long-term toxicity may become a problem - but see https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/) is a single research project in Calgary which found that post-menopausal women had a greater decline in bone mineral density with 4000 or 10,000IU D3 than with a lower intake of 400IU/day. Their computed bone strength did not fall any faster. The article is: https://sci-hub.se/10.1002/jbmr.4152 . This was not expected. The research looks good to me. I know of one person who is a world expert in bone mineral density measurement who dismissed it, but I think this needs to be taken seriously. I plan to discuss it with the vitamin D researchers I know and write about it in the future. My guess is that post-menopausal women need medical advice regarding bone mineral density and that supplementing with boron, magnesium and perhaps other nutrients would help them. Why higher, normally healthy, D3 intakes cause this undesired outcome is a mystery. I doubt that anyone can solve this mystery, and I doubt this demanding, precise, research study will be replicated.
My overall impression is that 70ng/ml to 100ng/ml might help some people in times of crisis like SARS-CoV-2 infection, but this is a gut feeling, based on lots of reading. I guess my level is in this range, and I am happy about it.
If you find your level is 50ng/ml and want to boost it, then higher than normal D3 intakes will do this over days and weeks. If you are 70kg and you have 50ng/ml from 3 to 5 months or more 0.125mg 5000IU D3 intake then I guess that if you doubled this, over another 3 to 5 months, you might get to 80ng/ml, since there are self-limiting processes which reduce 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, broadly according to these levels. (The processes are complex - I only vaguely understand them and I am not sure that anyone fully understands them.)
I think that boosting your levels anyway, presumably before any infection, is a better idea than waiting until you are infected to boost them. So, unless you are infected right now, I don't think you need calcifediol. If you are infected right now, and have calcifediol, then use it. If you are infected and don't have it, use bolus D3 (assuming your levels are lower than 50ng/ml) since you can get this today from the supermarket rather than waiting a week or so for delivery of calcifediol.
1mg of calcifediol is about as effective at raising 25-hydroxyvitamin D, in the _long_term_ as about 3 to 5mg of D3. (In the short term, it is much faster.) If we assume the high number, then 1mg is roughly equivalent to 5mg 200,000IU D3. This is a decent bolus dose for 70kg bodyweight. Twice this would be good for those with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D. If you think your level is already 50ng/ml, then I suggest that this is probably OK. Retired Professor of Medicine, Sunil Wimalawansa, who I collaborate with, is a long-time vitamin D researcher and he regards this 0.014mg calcifediol per kg bodyweight single dose to be safe in all circumstances, unless of course the person was already at, or close to, 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels which were destabilising their calcium levels and so causing toxicity: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sunilwimalawansa_multisystem-inflammatory-syndrome-mis-activity-6815294839769436160-99qJ/
An excellent video by Indian Doctor Renu Mahtani uploaded to YouTube in May 2020 explains the efficacy of Vitamin D as a Coronavirus prophylactic. I thought I'd post it here so it may be added to Robin's compendium of C19 research. Thanks. https://youtu.be/kWXiyLIN4c4
I would be interested in your take on these. One should also examine evidence and arguments which are counter to a viewpoint one supports, not just studies which confirm it.
There are a growing number of meta analysis articles regarding vitamin D and COVID-19. I don't try to keep up with them all.
To evaluate a meta analysis it is necessary to chase into each study it includes and then evaluate what intervention the study involved and all the details of the experiment and how it is analysed.
It is obvious from Dror et al. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0263069 that pre-infection 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels strongly anti-correlated with COVID-19 severity. The best results from vitamin D intervention RCTs with hospitalised COVID-19 patients are those from Spain which use a single dose of 0.532 mg calcifediol, at the earliest opportunity. For instance, Castillo et al. 2020, as analysed by Jungreis and Kellis: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#2020-Castillo . Calcifediol is 25-hydroxyvitamin D and this dose raises circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels well over 50 ng/mL in 4 hours. ICU admissions dropped from 50% to 2% and deaths from 8% to zero. Some of this striking outcome was due to imperfect randomisation, but most of it must have been due to the patients suddenly having the 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune system needs to fight pathogens AND to stop the wildly dysregulated inflammatory responses which cause severe COVID-19: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/icu/#2021-Chauss .
Perhaps the best known vitamin D RCT to produce little or no benefit for hospitalised COVID-19 patients is Murai et al. 2021: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776738 . This was simply too little vitamin D3 cholecalciferol, too late. It takes days to hydroxylate vitamin D3 in the liver (and these people were seriously ill, so their livers may not have been functioning well) to make the 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs.
It is much better to use calcifediol, and to do it early. Best of all, 50 ng/ml or more 25-hydroxyvitamin D before infection strongly protects against severe symptoms, as Dror et al. 2022 show. See also the graph and links to articles at: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#vc
The second article you cite, by Rita Rubin, is fairly typical of articles which disparage vitamin D or ivermectin. They never discuss the best evidence for the treatment in question. Rubin mentions a completely fake study which was supposedly done in Indonesia. This is no reflection on vitamin D - it is a bogus article made up by two young men in the Philippines who were doing it for a lark. See my work on exposing this and other related fake articles: https://researchveracity.info/alra/#R-article .
Rita Rubin has surely never seen Quraishi et al. 2015: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/02-autocrine/#04-quraishi which shows immune system failure increasing below 50 ng/mL 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Nor would she understand the immune system's reliance on vitamin D based autocrine signaling, which that page describes. (I wrote it because I could find no article which introduces it to people who were not already familiar with it. This is a failing of the vitamin D research literature in general.)
She quotes Caroline Ross citing the lousy 600 to 1000 IU a day vitamin D3 intake quantities, which are based on the totally mistaken Institute of Medicine RDA calculation in 2011. This has never been corrected, despite it being shown to be too small by a factor of about 10. See the two articles which showed this, cited at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/01-supp/#iom . The RDA was the centerpiece of the IOM's 1100 page report. They calculated the RDA by using the variance of the averages of several studies, rather than the variance of each individual in all the studies!
Due to wide individual variation in 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, even with a single vitamin D intake quantity - due in part to the great variation in bodyweight - the RDA concept is not very useful, as I argue on that same page. See Afshar et al. for a better approach: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/01-supp/#2020-Afshar - 70 to 100 IU per kg bodyweight vitamin D3 a day, over several years and hundreds of people, resulted in 40 to 79 ng/mL, which is an excellent outcome. If they had used a higher set of ratios, such multiplied by 1.5, they would probably have narrowed the outcome to something like 52 to 79 ng/mL (my guess).
Some doctors are extremely hostile to the idea that nutrition is important to disease outcome. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/968682 Can you think of a more stupid position? Most commenters to this article took a very dim view of it.
I have been a vitamin D groupie for roughly a decade. My last test showed 94. I convinced a relative whom I employ to take it daily. Sadly, she is not as interested in fitness, and is morbidly obese. Her husband *kind of* bought into the D argument. He is also obese, but not as religious about taking his vitamins. Then along came Covid. He almost didn't make it. She breezed through it with cold symptoms, along with the telltale taste/smell issues. Her vitamin D level was 54. Her husband was either not tested, or didn't learn his levels.
I refuse to wear masks unless I have no choice (medical visits, air travel, etc.) If I have contracted C19 in the last two years, I am blissfully unaware. I chose survival over avoidance. My life is infinitely richer as a result.
The USD$55 you spend on an ounce of this liquid (30 servings) would pay for 3.4 of these bottles of 400 0.025mg 10,000IU D3 oil-filled capsules: https://www.ebay.com/itm/393537544924 . For 70kg, one of these every 2 days would be good - and 3 bottles would last 6.5 years.
Good sumary! Thanks! I'll Substack a link to here tomorrow. I've written a shorter piece for people who don't want to be flooded with all the links to the studies I usually post: https://heddahenrik.substack.com/p/covidsum
Regarding Quilette's chief, Claire Lehmann...when she tweeted out how sexual abuse of children was moral panic, I offered to share my story with her about growing up in this cult:
(That's a lawsuit I worked to engineer, and there are more coming that will involve a wide range of powerful people, including some who served high up in military and government positions.)
Her response was to block me on Twitter.
I watched the accounts around Quillette since then, and decided they were likely an erected media machine to draw in those looking for independent media, but probably found a trap.
Hi Robin, this is DJ from the Steve Kirsch post. Thanks for all the great work you are doing and providing.
I have been reading your web posts and I see you recommend 0.5mg to 1.0mg of 25OHD calcifediol at first signs of covid.
I want to order some. Do you still recommend d.velop or Fortaro for US citizens?
I see both products have 60 .01 mg tablets per bottle. So I would need 100 tabs to get to 1mg. Is that correct. Then 2 bottles would do it. Correct?
It looks like d.velop lowered it’s price from what you said was $30 to $18. Sounds like the best deal.
Hi DJ, Thanks for your appreciation! I hadn't noticed that the d.velop price had dropped from USD$30 to USD$20 a bottle of 60 x 0.01mg calcifediol tablets: https://dvelopimmunity.com/products/vitamin-d . The USD$18 is with the default arrangement of recurring orders of 3 bottles every 3 months ("subscription").
I went through the steps of the shopping cart with a California address for 3 bottles and the price was USD$65.70 including taxes, with free shipping within the USA.
I have revised the calcifediol page https://vitamindstopscovid.info/04-calcifediol/ with a new "guidance" section at the start which explains my thoughts on the purposes for which calcifediol should be purchased. I hope this answers your questions. Please comment hear again if not.
Thanks Robin, I have another question. I'm waiting for my results from grassroots but I expect my level will be 50 or above. In the event that I get covert symptoms has your research indicated that it would be good to take 0.5mg to 1.0mg so of 25OHD calcifediol.
Hi Dj, Please remember that my opinion is of no consequence, since I have no medical training. It is up to you what you decide and you may choose to follow the research links I cite here and in my websites as part of your own research.
The benefit of a single oral dose of calcifediol over bolus (single, or over a few days, much larger than normal daily supplemental intake quantity) vitamin D3 cholecalciferol is that the calcifediol, which _is_ 25-hydroxyvitamin D, will boost your circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D in 4 hours or so, vs. some longer period, likely days to a week, with D3, due to D3's need to be hydroxylated in the liver.
The only argument I know of for why having levels higher then 50ng/ml (but still below 150ng/ml, above which long-term toxicity may become a problem - but see https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/) is a single research project in Calgary which found that post-menopausal women had a greater decline in bone mineral density with 4000 or 10,000IU D3 than with a lower intake of 400IU/day. Their computed bone strength did not fall any faster. The article is: https://sci-hub.se/10.1002/jbmr.4152 . This was not expected. The research looks good to me. I know of one person who is a world expert in bone mineral density measurement who dismissed it, but I think this needs to be taken seriously. I plan to discuss it with the vitamin D researchers I know and write about it in the future. My guess is that post-menopausal women need medical advice regarding bone mineral density and that supplementing with boron, magnesium and perhaps other nutrients would help them. Why higher, normally healthy, D3 intakes cause this undesired outcome is a mystery. I doubt that anyone can solve this mystery, and I doubt this demanding, precise, research study will be replicated.
My overall impression is that 70ng/ml to 100ng/ml might help some people in times of crisis like SARS-CoV-2 infection, but this is a gut feeling, based on lots of reading. I guess my level is in this range, and I am happy about it.
If you find your level is 50ng/ml and want to boost it, then higher than normal D3 intakes will do this over days and weeks. If you are 70kg and you have 50ng/ml from 3 to 5 months or more 0.125mg 5000IU D3 intake then I guess that if you doubled this, over another 3 to 5 months, you might get to 80ng/ml, since there are self-limiting processes which reduce 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, broadly according to these levels. (The processes are complex - I only vaguely understand them and I am not sure that anyone fully understands them.)
I think that boosting your levels anyway, presumably before any infection, is a better idea than waiting until you are infected to boost them. So, unless you are infected right now, I don't think you need calcifediol. If you are infected right now, and have calcifediol, then use it. If you are infected and don't have it, use bolus D3 (assuming your levels are lower than 50ng/ml) since you can get this today from the supermarket rather than waiting a week or so for delivery of calcifediol.
1mg of calcifediol is about as effective at raising 25-hydroxyvitamin D, in the _long_term_ as about 3 to 5mg of D3. (In the short term, it is much faster.) If we assume the high number, then 1mg is roughly equivalent to 5mg 200,000IU D3. This is a decent bolus dose for 70kg bodyweight. Twice this would be good for those with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D. If you think your level is already 50ng/ml, then I suggest that this is probably OK. Retired Professor of Medicine, Sunil Wimalawansa, who I collaborate with, is a long-time vitamin D researcher and he regards this 0.014mg calcifediol per kg bodyweight single dose to be safe in all circumstances, unless of course the person was already at, or close to, 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels which were destabilising their calcium levels and so causing toxicity: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sunilwimalawansa_multisystem-inflammatory-syndrome-mis-activity-6815294839769436160-99qJ/
This blog post help me get over covid only with two days of fever.
An excellent video by Indian Doctor Renu Mahtani uploaded to YouTube in May 2020 explains the efficacy of Vitamin D as a Coronavirus prophylactic. I thought I'd post it here so it may be added to Robin's compendium of C19 research. Thanks. https://youtu.be/kWXiyLIN4c4
Are you familiar with this paper, which claimed no benefit from Vitamin-D with respect to COVID-19?
https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937-021-00744-y
Or this article which discusses weak evidence of benefit?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2775003
I would be interested in your take on these. One should also examine evidence and arguments which are counter to a viewpoint one supports, not just studies which confirm it.
Hi Darren,
There are a growing number of meta analysis articles regarding vitamin D and COVID-19. I don't try to keep up with them all.
To evaluate a meta analysis it is necessary to chase into each study it includes and then evaluate what intervention the study involved and all the details of the experiment and how it is analysed.
It is obvious from Dror et al. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0263069 that pre-infection 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels strongly anti-correlated with COVID-19 severity. The best results from vitamin D intervention RCTs with hospitalised COVID-19 patients are those from Spain which use a single dose of 0.532 mg calcifediol, at the earliest opportunity. For instance, Castillo et al. 2020, as analysed by Jungreis and Kellis: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#2020-Castillo . Calcifediol is 25-hydroxyvitamin D and this dose raises circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels well over 50 ng/mL in 4 hours. ICU admissions dropped from 50% to 2% and deaths from 8% to zero. Some of this striking outcome was due to imperfect randomisation, but most of it must have been due to the patients suddenly having the 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune system needs to fight pathogens AND to stop the wildly dysregulated inflammatory responses which cause severe COVID-19: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/icu/#2021-Chauss .
Perhaps the best known vitamin D RCT to produce little or no benefit for hospitalised COVID-19 patients is Murai et al. 2021: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776738 . This was simply too little vitamin D3 cholecalciferol, too late. It takes days to hydroxylate vitamin D3 in the liver (and these people were seriously ill, so their livers may not have been functioning well) to make the 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs.
It is much better to use calcifediol, and to do it early. Best of all, 50 ng/ml or more 25-hydroxyvitamin D before infection strongly protects against severe symptoms, as Dror et al. 2022 show. See also the graph and links to articles at: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#vc
The second article you cite, by Rita Rubin, is fairly typical of articles which disparage vitamin D or ivermectin. They never discuss the best evidence for the treatment in question. Rubin mentions a completely fake study which was supposedly done in Indonesia. This is no reflection on vitamin D - it is a bogus article made up by two young men in the Philippines who were doing it for a lark. See my work on exposing this and other related fake articles: https://researchveracity.info/alra/#R-article .
Rita Rubin has surely never seen Quraishi et al. 2015: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/02-autocrine/#04-quraishi which shows immune system failure increasing below 50 ng/mL 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Nor would she understand the immune system's reliance on vitamin D based autocrine signaling, which that page describes. (I wrote it because I could find no article which introduces it to people who were not already familiar with it. This is a failing of the vitamin D research literature in general.)
She quotes Caroline Ross citing the lousy 600 to 1000 IU a day vitamin D3 intake quantities, which are based on the totally mistaken Institute of Medicine RDA calculation in 2011. This has never been corrected, despite it being shown to be too small by a factor of about 10. See the two articles which showed this, cited at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/01-supp/#iom . The RDA was the centerpiece of the IOM's 1100 page report. They calculated the RDA by using the variance of the averages of several studies, rather than the variance of each individual in all the studies!
Due to wide individual variation in 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, even with a single vitamin D intake quantity - due in part to the great variation in bodyweight - the RDA concept is not very useful, as I argue on that same page. See Afshar et al. for a better approach: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/01-supp/#2020-Afshar - 70 to 100 IU per kg bodyweight vitamin D3 a day, over several years and hundreds of people, resulted in 40 to 79 ng/mL, which is an excellent outcome. If they had used a higher set of ratios, such multiplied by 1.5, they would probably have narrowed the outcome to something like 52 to 79 ng/mL (my guess).
Some doctors are extremely hostile to the idea that nutrition is important to disease outcome. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/968682 Can you think of a more stupid position? Most commenters to this article took a very dim view of it.
Please see https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/calcifediol-to-boost-25-hydroxyvitamin for how to use calcifediol to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D over 50 ng/mL in 4 hours. I think the best meta-analysis of vitamin D and COVID-19 research is: https://vdmeta.com
I have been a vitamin D groupie for roughly a decade. My last test showed 94. I convinced a relative whom I employ to take it daily. Sadly, she is not as interested in fitness, and is morbidly obese. Her husband *kind of* bought into the D argument. He is also obese, but not as religious about taking his vitamins. Then along came Covid. He almost didn't make it. She breezed through it with cold symptoms, along with the telltale taste/smell issues. Her vitamin D level was 54. Her husband was either not tested, or didn't learn his levels.
I refuse to wear masks unless I have no choice (medical visits, air travel, etc.) If I have contracted C19 in the last two years, I am blissfully unaware. I chose survival over avoidance. My life is infinitely richer as a result.
Incidentally, I take 10,000 IU daily in winter, 5000 in summer. I partake in nude sunbathing in summer to boost my levels.
Thanks Robin, I do have the calcifediol arrived a few days ago. If I get the covid symptoms I will take it. Thanks for all the link I'll check it out.
Have you heard of this? If you scroll down you'll see that they say it brings up your vitamin d level. https://lifegivingstore.com/store/nano-soma/
Hi Dj, the so-called case study for that product https://pandemicsurvivor.com/2016/02/22/nano-policosanol-study-shows-increased-vitamin-d/ was not published or shown in any way to be real, was very small, and involved terribly low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, with the changes perhaps not being very significant. The discussion of vitamin D receptors shows the author has no idea how vitamin D based autocrine signaling works: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/02-autocrine/
The USD$55 you spend on an ounce of this liquid (30 servings) would pay for 3.4 of these bottles of 400 0.025mg 10,000IU D3 oil-filled capsules: https://www.ebay.com/itm/393537544924 . For 70kg, one of these every 2 days would be good - and 3 bottles would last 6.5 years.
thanks for sharing that. So you see no value in this product? It has other purported values.
Good sumary! Thanks! I'll Substack a link to here tomorrow. I've written a shorter piece for people who don't want to be flooded with all the links to the studies I usually post: https://heddahenrik.substack.com/p/covidsum
Regarding Quilette's chief, Claire Lehmann...when she tweeted out how sexual abuse of children was moral panic, I offered to share my story with her about growing up in this cult:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/women-allege-sexual-abuse-virginia-summer-camp-77380288
(That's a lawsuit I worked to engineer, and there are more coming that will involve a wide range of powerful people, including some who served high up in military and government positions.)
Her response was to block me on Twitter.
I watched the accounts around Quillette since then, and decided they were likely an erected media machine to draw in those looking for independent media, but probably found a trap.
Excellent info. Agree completely about GJ comments. Actually will need to read this a few times!