Vitamin D and early treatment vs. the COVID Vaccine Juggernaut

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.

Quillette.com is a bastion of free-speech - and for many a refuge from censorious, overly politicised, argumentative media and discussion sites. I was surprised and alarmed to read a rare Quillette op-ed supporting governments implementing internationally standardised arrangements for vaccine passports, to encourage everyone (children? how young??) to be COVID-19 vaccinated and to make it easy for businesses and governments to restrict the freedom of movement of those who have not yet done so.

Making the (Conservative) Case for Vaccine Passports
The Quillette Editorial Board 2021-09-03
quillette.com/2021/09/03/making-the-conservative-case-for-vaccine-passports/

Two updates on 7th September:

1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-07/nsw-records-1220-covid19-cases-eight-deaths/100439846 In the Australian state of New South Wales, police will check that picnickers are fully vaccinated if they enjoy new freedoms which are about to be granted to them, but not those who have not received two injections:
   
   “You need to be able to prove you have been vaccinated. That's part of the conditions of having those freedoms that you've got to be able to prove if you're pulled up by police," Deputy Premier Mr Barilaro said.
   
   People can prove they are double-dosed through the myGov or Medicare app which shows immunisation records. In the future, proof of immunisation will be part of the Service NSW app people use to check into venues.

2. https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/aussie-health-chief-covid-will-be-us-forever-people-will-have-get-used-endless-booster NSW Chief Health Officer, Deputy Secretary, Population and Public Health Dr Kerry Chant said:
   
   “We need to get used to being vaccinated with COVID vaccines for the future. I can’t see that COVID is not going to be with us forever. Maybe in the future we can have even better vaccines and coverage across the world to achieve that. Booster doses, repeat doses, will be part of it. . . . This will be a regular cycle of vaccination and re-vaccination as we learn more about when immunity wanes.”
   
   (I wrote to her about vitamin D, calcifediol and early treatment on 2021-07-23.)

Here is my first Substack article: an extended version of the comment I made to the Quillette editorial. Below is a full transcript of Professor Sir Andrew Pollard’s evidence on 10th August 2021 to the UK Parliament’s All-Party Group on Coronavirus, concerning the myth of vaccine-induced herd immunity. This is an important admission by the leader of the Oxford Vaccine Group, who co-developed the AstraZeneca adenovirus vector COVID-19 vaccine.

50ng/ml 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels needed for proper immune system function

It is a huge mistake to keep pushing the COVID-19 vaccines for all juggernaut as if it was the best solution - or even a solution at all - to the pandemic. Vaccines (except for those with special needs) and lockdowns are the 3rd and 4th best approaches to protecting the public, with masks and social distancing being of marginal importance.

The best solution is raising most people’s 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels to at least the 50ng/ml (125nmol/L) level the immune system requires for proper functioning. There are numerous reasons for doing this, irrespective of COVID-19. Please see What every MD should know about vitamin D and the immune system vitamindstopscovid.info/05-mds/ and take a look at the diseases listed at vitamindwiki.com.

The research of Quraishi et al. 2014 clearly shows that the innate and adaptive immune responses which protect against bacterial pathogens which cause hospital-acquired and surgical site infections increasingly fail to do so the more the blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D falls below 50ng/ml (one part in 20 million by mass).

There is very little vitamin D3 in food or multivitamins. Ultraviolet B exposure of unprotected skin can produce plenty of D3, but this is only possible with special lamps or high-elevation sunlight, without glass or sunscreen protection. Such UV-B also damages DNA and so raises the risk of skin cancer.

Most people who do not properly supplement vitamin D3 - such as 0.125mg 5000IU/day for 70kg 154lb bodyweight - have 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels 1/2 to 1/10th of what their immune system needs.

Such healthy, regular, daily D3 takes several months to attain the desired levels. To boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in a few days, 60 times the daily intake is a good amount to take as a single, bolus, dose over one or a few days. It takes several days to a week for most of the D3 to be hydroxylated in the liver into circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which has a half life of a month or so. Han et al. 2016 gave 12.5mg 500,000IU D3 to ICU patients over 5 days, halving their average length of stay in hospital from 36 to 18 days.

For D3 daily supplemental intakes as a ratio of bodyweight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity, see the ratios I derived from the research of Ekwaru et al. 2014: vitamindstopscovid.info/01-supp/. Ideally there would be such guidance in the vitamin D research literature, but the closest I could find did not include the extra intakes necessary to compensate for the absorption of D3 and 25-hydroxyvitamin D by the excess adipocytes caused by obesity.

Early treatment, starting with 50ng/ml 25-hydroxyvitamin D

The second best way of preventing COVID-19 transmission and harm is early treatment for all people newly diagnosed with COVID-19 or reasonably suspected of having been infected.

For those whose 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are not already at healthy 50ng/ml levels or more (there’s no need - or time - for a test, the person knows their recent sun exposure and D3 supplementation history) the first and most important early treatment is boosting their levels ASAP.

The bolus dose just mentioned is most likely to be available. For those who can access calcifediol, as all doctors should be able to do, a single oral dose of (very approximately - this is not critical) 0.014mg calcifediol per kg bodyweight will attain the desired 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in 4 hours. This is 1mg for 55 to 85kg bodyweight. Castillo et al. 2020 (statistical analysis) gave a single 0.532mg oral dose of calcifediol to hospitalised COVID-19 patients, which reduced ICU admissions from 50% to 2% and deaths from 8% to zero.

Calcifediol is the pharmaceutical name for 25-hydroxyvitamin D. It is easily absorbed and goes straight into the bloodstream, without D3’s need to be hydroxylated in the liver. For full details of this - and where calcifediol can be purchased, including online and without prescription - please see: vitamindstopscovid.info/04-calcifediol/ and this post by retired New Jersey Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa (who I collaborate with): www.linkedin.com/posts/sunilwimalawansa_multisystem-inflammatory-syndrome-mis-activity-6815294839769436160-99qJ/ .

Ivermectin is an excellent early treatment with anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties: ivmmeta.com.

So is 10mg melatonin at night: Farnoosh et al. 2021. Both ivermectin and melatonin are recommended by Dr Paul Marik, Dr Pierre Kory, Dr Joseph Varon and colleagues at the Frontline COVID Critical Care Alliance: covid19criticalcare.com who lead the world in early and hospital treatment of COVID-19. They also use zinc, vitamin C, other nutrients, quercetin and vitamin D - but their vitamin D quantities are too small for this clinical emergency.

In the next two weeks I should have a proper early treatment page at vitamindstopscovid.info including a detailed review of the 7 most significant ivermectin early treatment trials listed in the “with [after] exclusions” table at ivmmeta.com.

There is an egregiously mistaken campaign of misinformation about ivermectin from the governments of the United States, Australia and many other countries - aided and supported by experts who apparently have not bothered to read the actual research, or who pride themselves on not accepting any new treatment, despite the good research and excellent safety record, without a series of perfectly designed randomised clinical trials, as would be required for a novel drug. None of the unreasonable critiques of ivermectin engage with the best evidence for its effectiveness. The same is true of numerous, ill-informed dismissals of the importance of vitamin D.

Either or both of these:

1. Vitamin D3 supplementation for most people to attain at least 50ng/ml 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

2. Early treatment at home for all those newly infected, backed up by better hospital treatment for the few who need it.

are far safer, more beneficial, less expensive and faster to deploy than “vaccines for all”.

Obesity, diabetes and immunosuppression for autoimmune inflammatory conditions

For people with co-morbidities - primarily obesity, diabetes, old age and/or lung damage etc. - no matter what nutritional status they attain and what early and hospital treatments they can expect to help them - COVID-19 poses a serious enough threat to make the risks of vaccination (which are only partially recognised so far) a worthwhile choice.

An easily identified class of people at higher risk of COVID-19 are those who use immunosuppression drugs to suppress autoimmune disorders such as psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease etc. These drugs, such as prednisolone and dexamethasone, are intended to reduce inflammatory responses. However, they also weaken innate and adaptive immune responses. This means the person’s ability to directly combat the virus is reduced - as is their ability to mount a good immune response to vaccination.

Doctors typically ignore these patients’ 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, or assume that 20ng/ml or 30ng/ml is sufficient. These people often benefit from much higher intakes of vitamin D3, attaining much higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, such as with the Coimbra Protocol for multiple sclerosis. Please see: vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/ for articles on these techniques, which should be followed under suitably informed medical supervision and which are also used to suppress psoriasis, cluster headaches, migraine and rheumatoid arthritis. These higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels - some over 150ng/ml - reduce the immune dysregulation which drives the excessive inflammation, whilst fully strengthening innate and adaptive responses against pathogens.

Vitamin D levels cause most of COVID-19’s and influenza’s seasonality

Vaccines have never been the best solution to COVID-19 or even influenza. For some diseases they certainly are - but not for these two, since they are transmitted and cause harm primarily due to people’s generally inadequate 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Furthermore, the vaccines for these diseases - at least in a population with lousy vitamin D levels - are leaky: they are only partially effective at stopping infection and transmission.

The seasonality of transmission and severity of influenza and COVID-19 in countries more than 30º from the equator is driven primarily by seasonal changes in population average 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. UV inactivation of viruses in aerosols and fomites (on surfaces) probably plays a minor role in summer.

Exterior air temperature and relative humidity is probably of little importance, since most transmission occurs in buildings and vehicles. The winter pattern of recirculating, warm to hot, low relative humidity air probably boosts transmission significantly since respiratory droplets dry to virus particles about the size of smoke particles, which remain aloft far longer than the droplets would with higher relative humidity.

Prof. Sir Andrew Pollard: the myth of vaccination leading to herd immunity

Geary Johansen substack - whose comments on Quillette articles I frequently more interesting then the articles themselves - pointed out that confidence among immunologists, infectious disease researchers and virologists in the ability of COVID-19 vaccines to provide herd immunity was low even in February 2021:

This didn’t stop hundreds of millions of people from citizens to presidents, aided and abetted by most MDs and the multinational pharma companies, in building up a vast international cargo-cult like movement in which vaccines were the only salvation from lockdowns, and any talk to the contrary was heresy - misinformation to be ignored or suppressed for the Greater Good.

Vaccinophile zeal is evident in calls for vaccine passports and as recently as mid-August when Professor of epidemiology Nancy Baxter spoke of the Australian state of Victoria “vaccinating our way out” of the need for lockdown restrictions.

After 2021-08-10, even the most ardent proponents should recognise that the benefit of COVID-19 vaccines is primarily reduction in symptom severity and that they are not a reliable method of reducing transmission. Evidence for this has been building and the question should be regarded as settled from that day by the admission of Prof. Sir Andrew Pollard that, no matter how many people are vaccinated, the COVID-19 vaccines cannot achieve herd immunity against the Delta variant.

This was in evidence to the UK Parliament All-Party Group on Coronavirus appgcoronavirus.marchforchange.uk Their website is not up-to-date. The YouTube video is: Vaccines and the future of the Covid-19 pandemic - YouTube 19:40.

Prof. Pollard is Professor of Paediatric Infection and Immunity at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group: Oxford Vaccine Group who co-developed the AstraZeneca adenovirus vector vaccine. Here is a full transcript of what he said regarding what he referred to as “mythical herd immunity”:

"This virus is not measles. If you have 95% of the population vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population.

"We know very clearly with the coronavirus, that the current Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated - and that does mean that anyone who is still unvaccinated, at some point, will meet the virus. That might not be this month or next month - it might be next year. At some point they will meet the virus.

"We don’t have anything which will stop that transmission to other people.

"The one thing that vaccines might do - just like wearing masks and so on - they may slow the process down a bit about transmission. And the bit of evidence there is that people who have been vaccinated seem to be shedding for a slightly shorter period of time. That means there is a bit less opportunity for them to spread to someone else.

"So I think we are in a situation here with this current variant that herd immunity is not a possibility, because it still infects vaccinated individuals.

"I suspect that what the virus will throw up next is a variant which is perhaps even better at transmitting in vaccinated populations. So that is even more of a reason not to be making a vaccine program around herd immunity.

"So when we come to think about children, one of the strongest arguments that has been made is to vaccinate children to protect adults. But there are two issues. One is that vaccinating children is not going to completely block transmission - it doesn’t achieve that goal.

"And then of course, secondly we need to get our adults vaccinated. We have been doing pretty well at doing that here - but not elsewhere in the world.

"So once you have got a highly vaccinated adult population, even if children were a major vehicle of transmission, that is not the issue, because the adults are vaccinated.

"And in fact, mild infection in someone who is vaccinated will boost their immunity. It will likely broaden their immunity to future variants as well as the current ones, and will increase the amount of immunity they have. So as long as you are vaccinated and are fortunate to get mild infection, then you are protected.

"There’s one other thing we really need to recall here, which is that the vaccines aren’t 100% effective. Some people, for reasons we don’t know, don’t get good protection from vaccination. But there are some groups where we know that they will have less optimal protection or maybe none - and those are some of the immunocompromised individuals.

"For those people, we have to focus on improving the treatments in hospital, because as COVID becomes something we live with, there are going to be people who in the years ahead who still become seriously ill with the infection. So we need to ensure that the work (…) and it is happening, to improve those treatments, so that when people develop symptoms at the front door, they can be managed well.

"I think one other issue (around children) we should bring up is this big burden on the education system, for the children: missing school. That is largely driven by the testing policies. If you test a lot of children and show that there are some cases, then you are sending home their contacts, classes or even year-groups, that has a huge impact.

"Given the children have relatively mild infections compared to adults - largely the exceptions are going to be vaccinated in the current vaccination program anyway - we probably should be moving to a situation where we are clinically driven. So if someone is unwell, then they should be tested, but for those contacts in the classroom, if they are not unwell, then it makes sense for them to be in school and being educated.

“And I think if we look at the adult population, going forwards, if we continue to chase community testing and worry about those results, then we will end up in a situation where we are constantly boosting [??] to try and deal with something which is not manageable. And over time we need to be moving to clinically driven testing as well. Its people who are unwell who get tested, treated and managed rather than lots of community testing of people who have had very mild disease.”

The next person in the video - Prof. Devi Sridhar - challenges the idea of children generally having mild infections. “Pediatric admissions in Florida and Texas are going up quite strongly.”

At the end of this article are links to other comments Professor Pollard made in this video.

Most MDs, immunologists, virologists and epidemiologists have no idea about the immune system’s dependence on vitamin D

Prof. Pollard does not seem to be thinking of the children and adolescents who develop Kawasaki disease or Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, triggered by potentially mild COVID-19 infections (Google Scholar). These sometimes deadly conditions are like sepsis - gross overly-inflammatory immune responses damaging the body, due primarily to our lack of helminths and very low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. He seems to be unaware of Stagi et al. 2015 who showed that children suffering from Kawasaki disease had very low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. The patients were 21 girls and 58 boys, average age 5.8 years. Their average levels were 9.2ng/ml, while age-matched controls averaged 23.3ng/ml. In the children who developed coronary artery abnormalities, the average 25-hydroxyvitamin D level was just 4.9ng/ml - a tenth of what all humans need for proper immune responses.

He has surely never read McGregor et al. 2020 An autocrine Vitamin D-driven Th1 shutdown program can be exploited for COVID-19 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.18.210161v1 (summary at aminotheory.com/cv19/icu/#2020-McGregor) who showed that Th1 regulatory lymphocytes from the lungs of hospitalised COVID-19 patients remain stuck in their pro-inflammatory startup program, never switching to their anti-inflammatory shutdown program due to their vitamin D based autocrine (inside each cell) signaling systems not working. The sole cause of this is inadequate supplies of 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Every doctor in the world should read this - the most important article ever written about the etiology of severe COVID-19.

This and likely similar patterns of pro-inflammatory immune dysregulation in cell types other than Th1 lymphocytes are surely the primary cause of the cytokine storm which drives inflammatory attack on the endothelial cells which line our blood vessels and capillaries. This destruction, especially in the lungs, causes hypoxia and prompts the body to respond with hypercoagulative blood, resulting in microembolisms and larger clots which damage the brain, heart, lungs and all other organs.

Most of the world bought into vaccines as a barrier to infection and transmission

Prof. Pollard portrays COVID-19 vaccines as being of limited value - primarily for reducing severity of symptoms. This is realistic and is no surprise to anyone who has avoided being swept along by the global mania which I refer to as the COVID Vaccine Juggernaut.

Governments and most doctors pushed the public very hard to accept COVID-19 vaccination as a barrier to severe illness and more importantly as a barrier to infection and transmission. (Hence the term breakthrough infection.) In fact, COVID-19 vaccines are of marginal value regarding infection and transmission. Most research to date indicates that they do have significant value in reducing severity and risk of death in general with the current average population situation of very low vitamin D, no access to early treatment and hospital treatment which is generally profoundly deficient compared to what should be done.

Global groupthink leading MDs etc. to incorrect understanding of diseases and treatments is a single point of failure which must be fixed

While some individuals and families can overcome the limitations of mainstream medical knowledge and practice, as long as those limitations lead to lockdowns and other inescapable forms of constraint and destruction, everyone on Earth is affected by a gross failure such as the current inadequate understanding of vitamin D.

Apart from a few autodidacts, the public is entirely dependent on the judgment of doctors - who depend very much on the knowledge of immunologists and other specialists, since the body of knowledge and experience doctors ideally acquire is inhumanly large. Quite a lot of this knowledge is in a state of flux and is subject to debate.

The vitamin D research literature is sprawling and frequently does not highlight the crucial importance of vitamin D based autocrine signaling in immune cells and many other cell types. Still, since 2008, all MDs should have taken more notice of the 48 MDs/researchers who have been pushing for 40 to 60ng/ml (100 to 150nmol/L) 25-hydroxyvitamin D to be the accepted minimum standard, rather than the 20 or 30ng/ml most MDs currently think is sufficient. Scientists’ Call to D*action for Public Health - GrassrootsHealth

The debacle of the US-Canadian Institute of Medicine 2010 report on vitamin D continues to distort MD’s understanding of proper 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and D3 daily intakes. 20ng/ml was recommended despite many researchers calling for 40 to 60ng/ml. Then the IOM completely fluffed their statistical calculation for the RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) of D3 to attain even this low level. The RDA is intended to ensure at least 97.5% of “adults” attain this level. They made a basic statistical mistake and decided on 600IU a day, which is about a tenth of what is needed. In fact, the RDA concept makes no sense given variation in bodyweight of “adults” all over the world. The details are at: vitamindstopscovid.info/01-supp/#iom.

This is a global, single, point of failure, since the majority of these experts firstly do not understand these important fundamentals of human health and secondly are captive within their global professional echo chambers which makes them resist new information in this regard.

Most doctors have no idea of the importance of 50ng/ml or more 25-hydroxyvitamin D to the immune system. The same seems to be true of immunologists, whose job it is to understand the immune system at a molecular level. This week I bought two immunology textbooks Abass 10th ed. 2022 587 pages and Janeways 9th Ed. Immunobiology 2017 904 pages. Neither mention vitamin D in their indexes.

The people leading the vaccine response are flying blind because they don’t understand vitamin D.

Governments should expect their doctors to fully understand this and to pursue all options for early treatment at home and for better hospital treatment. Instead - cheered on by an increasingly desperate majority of the public who were sold COVID-19 vaccines as a barrier - they are suppressing discussion of anything which is not vaccines and lockdowns.

The push for vaccine passports and mandates ignores the dangers of the vaccines (which are surely higher than what is currently recognised) and the fact that vaccine-acquired immunity is narrow and fades (boosters already, 8 months after the campaign began). Those advocating “vaccine passports” ignore the stronger, broader and longer lasting infection-acquired immunity in favor of a rolling, government-driven, population-wide program of booster injections and resultant immune system disturbance every 6 to 12 months to maintain this limited protection.

“Vaccinate everyone” really means vaccinating children, to some unspecified early age, because they keep being born!

Quillette’s position seems consistent with the views of the majority of some country’s populations who have been vaccinated and who proudly proclaim the fact, including with images of bandages and needles in their social media photo emblems, profile picture frames etc. Their collective position is along the lines of “We made this sacrifice, including accepting non-zero risks, for the benefit of Society. Everyone else should do so as well. Those who don’t are morons or sociopaths who spread disease and give governments little option but to lock down the entire society. Those who refuse to be vaccinated should not get the freedoms which we-the-virtuously-vaccinated have earned and fully deserve.”

There are grains of truth in this, especially in the current low-vitamin D, no early treatment regime. Infected vaccinated people can infect fully vaccinated parents who then pass the disease along to their children, who can’t or shouldn’t be vaccinated. However, it is now known that vaccination provides only marginal reduction in transmission. Rather than fuss over this threat to their children, such parents should read the research and ensure their entire family’s 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels up to healthy levels all year round. They should also prepare early treatments in their home, for instant action if they are infected, without delays involving doctor’s appointments, prescriptions etc.

Those who think we can vaccinate our way to freedom should educate themselves on vitamin D, the immune system and early treatment. They should insist that all doctors do the same. They should protect doctors who criticise the current vaccination program from government censure. Likewise doctors and others who research and promote genuinely beneficial nutritional and early treatment approaches to dealing with COVID-19.

Refs for this graph are at my older and less organised site: aminotheory.com/cv19/#vc.

Here are links to particular parts of the video in which Professor Andrew Pollard spoke. I have tried to summarise the subjects he mentioned:

• Risks and benefits for children - who he says are largely unaffected by COVID-19. 2048 and 5012.

• New variants are going to appear. The current (delta) variant and others of significance appeared before vaccination programs. No variants of concern have arisen from populations which have been vaccinated. 2432.

• Learning to live with endemic COVID-19. 3645.

• Booster doses not yet justified by reduction in protection against severe disease. Better to use available doses for other countries rather than boosters for those in the UK. 4857, 6020.

• Vaccine expiry dates - set by regulator based on available evidence. 4767.

• Political priorites, including the value of sending vaccines to other countries such as in Africa, where COVID-19 is disrupting vaccination of children against measles and other diseases. 2180, 2770, 4053, 4665, 5696 and 6426.