The proper claim is that raising people from deficient (<20ng/ml) to a sufficient level (>30ng/ml ideally) should improve outcomes. Sometimes looking at a subset of those who started deficient is good enough to find such an effect, but sometimes it isn't, such as if the dose used was not high enough to raise people up enough, particularly common if the subjects weights were high which requires higher intakes to move the needle a lot, so other subset analysis look at norm-weight subjects. Proper study guidelines were published in the mid 2010s and meta-analyses like this one that aggregate many studies that don't conform to these guidelines are just as invalid as individual studies that don't.
Nonesense. It's well established that dietary D3 (or D2, but D3 is better) clearly incleases 25(OH)D serum levels. It is that serum biomarker whose deficiency (levels below 20ng/ml or 30ng/ml) that has the largest association with higher risk of dozens of diseases as well as all-cause mortality. You can defend your phrasing by saying that "not well" just means one has to take a lot of it. Yes, there is a wide variety of dose response, which is why it's best to test blood levels to titrate supplementation amount.
The academic paper this story is based on is here: https://nature.com/articles/s43587-024-00793-y
Despite the linked story title only mentioning omega3, the paper was about 3 interventions, that, vitamin D, exercise and found reduced epigenetic age from the interventionts, with bigger anti-aging benefit as they were combined.
With respect to vitamin D specifically, this isn't by itself good evidence vitamin D reverses aging. But it is consistent with the totality of evidence that being vitamin D deficient probably (causally) speeds aging. And it mildly increases the overall weight of evidence of a connection.
As with much vitamin D research, it would have been better for the intervention to have been titrate vitamin D supplement amount to achieve an optimal target range (eg 30-60ng/ml) rather than using a fixed relative moderate dose (2000IU).
The problem with a fixed dose is that surely some subjects started severely deficient, some mildly, and some had sufficient levels. The moderate but not very high fixed dose will have helped many in the middle group climb out of deficiency, not been enough for many in the 1st group to bring them fully out of deficiency, and been unnecessary for those in the 3rd group, so the study ends up seeing a weaker overall effect averaged over all subjects. This is well known within the vitamin D world, eg see https://x.com/KarlPfleger/status/1732514710715514883, but somehow has not permeated to be widely enough understood, even within the scientific community (or the Hacker News community).
No, ample evidence shows that vitamin D (or vitamin D deficiency at least) is causally related to multiple diseases. The evidence is pretty overwhelming. Eg here's a just published review on D deficiency causality for Covid based on applying Hill's Criteria for causality https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/3/599 and a prior 2022 paper on the same subject https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35308241/
Some vitamin D skeptics claim tat there's insufficient evidence from RCTs but few people question the causality of smoking's influence on cancer despite no RCTs for that---that relationship was established also via Hill's Criteria.
I've collected the results from all 4 papers including the links to all 4 in a Google spreadsheet for easily lining up the results for each stage of Covid: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a5twV0x-TlHzd2AVr9e1...
1 tab for the links & underlying number of studies/patients & 1 tab for the results.
4 big systematic meta-analyses since Dec'21. Consistent results from all 4: Low D levels or not supplementing D has 1.5x-3x worse Covid risk at all stages (infection to mortality).
One reason getting these from the evolved route may be better is because feedback mechanisms stop making the beneficial substance when the body has enough, which may not happen via intake by other methods. This is the case for vitamin D from sun vs oral D supplements. Serum levels stop going up when they reach a natural adequate evolutionary range if it's coming from sun. I don't know if that's true of NO or not. Or of melatonin from the near-infra-red wavelengths, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I thought this piece spent too much time arguing about the wrong things (such as evolutionary stuff). I added 3 comments on what I think are the most important points with links to scientific research to the comments on Apr 22. Just search for Pfleger using find-in-page to read them.
Just how much lower it would get cannot be discerned from available data yet. It is very hard to believe from current data that it would go all the way to zero and also very hard to believe that fixing all vitamin D deficiency would not save any lives. The confidence interval range in between is still large, but it is absolutely (past) time to act on the data because it is so unlikely to not help (or even not help a lot). And the data is so far consistent with the possibility that it could help so much that it would have reduced the pandemic to no worse than prior flu seasons had everyone's vitamin D been brought up above 30ng/ml before SARS-CoV-2 arrived.
Did you read the open letter (original link of thread)? There is an entire paragraph and footnote with 2 refs talking about the problem with the current government guidelines.
The site itself was set up (by me) just to host this open letter, just as the site masks4all.co was set up to host the similar open letter that happened for masks in the spring. The credibility isn't of the site itself but of the signatories of the site, which are listed plainly (with any conflicts of interest). Look through the list yourself to judge their credibility.
This has been a big problem. Some people labeled science on vitamin D & covid19 as misinformation, lumping vitamin D in with things that have little to no evidence even when the vitamin D evidence was mounting rapidly. Part of the point of this open letter is to show that many serious people agree that vitamin D should be used in the pandemic. The inappropriate suppression of this message is now the mis-information. This should be clear from reading the letter and its very few references carefully.
The FLCCC has been pushing Ivermectin, but I am not aware of an open letter analogous to this one or the similar one for masks that is signed by 100+ doctors & scientists.
I have not personally read the Ivermectin literature, but I think the FLCCC's methodology is good. (Paul Marik of FLCCC is a signatory on this vitamin D letter, BTW.) But it's notable that no one has Ivermectin deficiency, whereas more than half of people have insufficient vitamin D, especially in winter, so increased D intake is justified even in the absence of this COVID19 pandemic.
185 experts. Over 100 medical doctors. Roughly 100 professors, including many of the most respected vitamin D experts in the world---check out the list of names and qualifications yourself.
Please read the link before posting about correlation or other opinions on the topic. The point is to note the aggregate credibility of the backers here. This is analogous to the open letter done for face masks last spring.
Terrible piece.
First off, the majority of people with D levels of ~80ng/ml are fine, even quite healthy. Her problem was too much calcium, which is related but they (at least not in the article) don't address what her calcium intake was. Probably she was supplementing that too if the original reason for her supplementation was osteopenia. It's not clear if she would have had any problems if she had just dropped her calcium to low-normal intake. Quite a large fraction of Americans consume too much dairy.
Article that cherry pick a single example are terrible when they pick the example that is 100x less common than the other side of the story.
35-40% of the US has D < 20ng/ml. That's probably 100x greater than the number that have D >= this woman's levels (~80) and probably only 1% of folks who have that level have any kind of medical issue with it the way she did.
I completely disagree with the idea that D should be thought of as a medication in the sense of being careful with it. The problem currently is not enough care to make sure to get enough.
19 organizations (all the big important ones) consider 4000 IU/day of vitamin D to be a safe intake without the need to consult a doctor.
The Endocrine Society and a few other orgs consider 10,000 IU/day safe.
At the level of 5000 IU/day that she was taking, a very large % of people will remain clinically deficient. Many, many more than will have any kind of adverse issues.
The right dose for society to advocate as a default is not the dose that causes huge amount of harm on the low end only to avoid any kind of harm on the high end at all. That kind of asymmetric health optimization is poor public policy.
But it's the way doctors think. Cover my ass and make sure to do no harm. The Hippocratic oath is a terrible way to optimize net health of society and it's unfortunate it has become entrenched in public health, not just the actions of individual doctors.
Some point the figure at big pharma. I've no evidence of any foul play, but the pharma industry would lose money if a large fraction of their revenue comes from drugs to treat conditions that are at least in part the consequence of inadequate vitamin D.
There seems to be more to it than that. Probably partially lack of belief that anything so simple, cheap, and easy could be such a help. I believe a similar skepticism surrounded mask use (and still does for a minority of folks).
And lack of the medical system (notably doctors) receiving much training in micronutrients.
And some amount of conservatism on the part of the bodies that do things like set RDAs. The IoM (now NAM) in the US was clearly being very conservative in its setting of the UL and its refusal to up the RDA when its statistical mistake in setting it was pointed out. And in the UK the recent NICE study was super-conservative (some would say narrow-minded) to only consider peer reviewed & published studies when it did a rapid review of D for C19 evidence.
But all this is just wild speculation to give you some idea since you asked. I would love to read the behind the scenes expose someday. Meantime I'm limiting myself to the evidence not looking into the conspiracy theories.
For detailed treatment of this see this thread on X: https://x.com/KarlPfleger/status/1732514710715514883