Dr John Campbell: The second pandemic

The UK's Dr John Campbell interviews Dr David Grimes, a consultant physician who is an expert on the importance of vitamin D to the proper functioning of our immune system, who explains that most populations are seriously deficient in this life-saving vitamin, which explains why so many people are getting sick with Covid and dying.

In particular he explains why the elderly, the obese and other populations groups are most at risk...

Matt Ridley: Correcting Vitamin D Deficiency Could Save Thousands of Lives

A groundbreaking new study points to a cheap, safe, effective way of tackling Covid

As we face six tough months of curfews, isolation and economic misery, with vaccines a distant hope, testing struggling to control the virus, and the hospitalisation rate once again rising, it’s surely time to try anything reasonable to slow the pandemic down. 

There is one chemical that is known to be safe, known to be needed by many people anyway, known to have a clinically proven track record of helping people fight off respiratory diseases, and is so cheap no big firm is pushing it: vitamin D. It is not a silver bullet, but growing evidence suggests that it might help prevent Covid turning serious in some people.

Matt Ridley: The growing evidence on vitamin D and Covid

The argument that vitamin D deficiency may contribute to more severe cases of Covid is gaining ground. It is now reaching the point where it is surprising that we are not hearing from leading medical officials and politicians that people should consider taking supplements to ensure they have sufficient vitamin D.

This is not the same as arguing that vitamin D is a magic bullet that will cure the disease. Vitamins are not medication, the taking of which will have positive effects on everybody. They are top-ups: things that hurt you when you don’t have enough of them in your system but do no extra good when you have enough. Indeed, with many vitamins, including D, taking too much can be toxic.

Matt Ridley: Vitamin D and Covid-19

There has long been evidence that a sufficiency of vitamin D protects against viruses

A suggestive set of numbers was published online in April by a medical scientist in the Philippines, Dr Mark Alipio. Of 49 patients with mild symptoms of Covid-19 in three hospitals in southern Asian countries, only two had low levels of vitamin D; of 104 patients with critical or severe symptoms, only four did not have low levels of vitamin D. 

The more severe the symptoms, the more likely a patient was to be not just low but deficient in the vitamin. Could vitamin D deficiency make the difference between getting very ill or not?