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.
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.
> > A few months ago people laughed at the suggestion. It was "dangerous" to "deceive" people about Vit D and Covid.
> Who? Doctors or people on the internet?
Last automn, I asked a medical doctor about Vitamin D and CoVid19 and he told me that he gets a lot of emails about news in medicine, and that he deletes everything that mentions Vitamin D, because some claims about Vitamin D were refuted in the '90s. I was suprised to say the least.
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.
The subsequent evidence of real-world effectiveness isn’t great: cases are skyrocketing around the northern hemisphere, and mask mandates aren’t making a difference. The only randomized controlled trial ever conducted for masks and covid was not able to detect any protective effect, yet was rejected from multiple journals because of “consensus”:
Science by signature count isn’t science; it’s a popularity contest. It’s perfectly fine to advocate for a belief, but nobody should pretend that they have the “scientific” argument simply because their signature list is longer.
The study shows that masks do little to protect the wearer - which is kind of obvious as it’s not going to filter incoming air very efficiently, that has never been the purpose of surgical masks. They don’t protect against airborne pathogens and every medical professional knows it.
You need a crítica mass for masks to start reducing transmission rates. Mask use is nowhere near what it should have been, so you cannot take any conclusions out of that.
> Mask use is nowhere near what it should have been
All available evidence shows that you’re wrong.
Self-reported mask usage rates are over 90%, nationwide. Moreover, many of the places with the highest compliance rates (e.g. Los Angeles) have the fastest-growing case counts:
Because population density and culture are the other factors. In most cases, combined with limiting large groups and reducing the frequency of meetings, it is doing what it is intended to do - reduce the R0 factor. Even in LA.
Every Internet pundit who can take one number and divide by another, announces they have proven something or other. Give it a rest.
There’s always an excuse, but there’s never any data backing your claims.
Provide even a single shred of evidence that masks affect the R0 of the virus in the real world.
Modeling studies and correlations observed in April don’t count: most of the papers published this year looked at areas where case counts subsequently skyrocketed in the fall. My personal favorite is the mask study from Jena, Germany in the spring, which only made it into a journal right as cases were reaching an all-time high in the same area:
Can you point me to any data showing that random quality cloth masks even reduce coronavirus transmission?
The recent Kaiser San Jose case[0] where one worker infected 44+ fellow staff, all of whom were wearing masks, ... from inside a tree costume would seem to be a great counterexample.
Essentially everyone I see in the wild has been wearing masks for months, with almost perfect compliance since the Fall surge, including myself. But it seems to be mostly theater. It's like stopping BBs with a volleyball net.
It also ignores the fact that the eyes are a bigger attack surface than the nose or a closed mouth.
If we had stressed the importance of not touching one's face combined with aggressive sanitization of hands, faces, and surfaces, Covid-19 might have waned into a quiet death even without a vaccine, like SARS and MERS before it.
Look at any 20 articles about Covid transmission from February to April. You'd be lucky to find one that stressed not touching surfaces over mask wearing.
In 37 California articles I saved from that period, exactly zero even mentioned not touching surfaces in equal or higher importance to wearing masks... and only 8 even mentioned surfaces as a transmission vector (generally, only doorhandles).
> It also ignores the fact that the eyes are a bigger attack surface than the nose or a closed mouth.
Again, the primary purpose of wearing a mask is not to protect you but everybody else. By making it harder for you to spread your viruses. So, it only protects you if everybody else around you wears them.
Nevertheless, masks have a small effect on protecting with regards to viruses entering your mouth and nose, but none on your eyes, obviously.
I don't understand your hard-lined conclusion when the paper that the blog post references can't reach a conclusion either.
The blog post also reaches a semi-hard lined conclusion yet still leaves room for additional work as it should.
Problems with the study:
- Not everyone the participants are interacting with also have a mask (Blog post references this with "protects you, not me")
- The result is "Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."
- "The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use."
My point is "Masks are in effective" can't be concluded from this. It failed to show a reduction of 50%, sure, but what about 25% at a higher CI? Was it literally 0% at 5 sigma? Clearly more work needs to be done to show 0% at any meaningful CI.
If you don't believe in masks fine, don't go see other people - it's way more effective anyway.
There's a difference between "mask mandates aren't making a difference" and "masks aren't effective." Take a look at Japan, where the government has done fuck all to deal with the virus, but people wear their masks.
OK: ” A record 7,841 new coronavirus cases were reported in Japan as of 8 p.m. on Friday. The nationwide daily tally has set a record for a fourth day in a row.”
Also the fact that mask mandates are poorly enforced, or that masks arent a replacement for other forms of prevention, or that some materials dont offer the same level of prevention dont change the fact that masks work
That's definitely the messaging public representatives use when communicating science issues to the general public. It's very effective at getting compliance across a society where our instinct is to look to our peers to figure out how to behave.
As others have said, what has made science effective at being a vehicle of growth and change is that it is empirical / evidence based. New ideas slowly diffuse and get accepted as evidence grows for their support (which can take a long while).
Decision making by evidence is also pretty much the opposite of natural human group behavior. I recommend reading/listening to some of the newer research on human psychology of groups. It pretty concretely shows that people consistently choose group harmony + stability over converging on the truth / correctness. Basically in a group we value getting along with each other a lot more (being in agreement / having consensus) than we value knowing what really is happening. Also, scientists being humans are not immune to this behavior either which is why evidence based progress is slow and can be resisted by established groups for lengthy periods.
That's a terribly optimistic view of science, speaking as someone who was also in the same boat. They might not just accept anything, but it'll be much easier if they want to believe you. This goes quintuple for social science.
No it's not. It's built on hypothesis and experiments (empiricism).
Just because the nazi party banned "jewish" physics doesn't mean that "jewish" science wasn't science.
You think science is a democracy? If 51% of scientists say the earth is flat, then it's flat? You think each nation has their own version of science built on consense of their own scientists?
It could also be that many of us have seen studies over the past few years about the general issues with Vitamin D deficiencies, so, in addition to the recent studies; it doesn't seem like such a leap that something as simple as increasing Vitamin D could benefit covid protection/recovery.
Right. We know most people have lower levels in winter. There is reason to believe it helps. There is little reason to think it may harm - particularly in light of the seasonal deficiency. Why would anyone not think it's worth trying? I've been wondering why the CDC hasn't recommended it yet.
I would guess that it depends on what your current vit D level is. Also, depending on your genotype you might be a fast or slow metabolizer of vit D, which would also play a role in how big of a dose you would need.
I recommend the talks/interviews by Dr. Stasha Gominak a neurologist specializing in sleep.
I've been doing 4,000 iu/day of Vitamin D since March, also supplementing Zinc and C, and taking a standard multivitamin. My entire household got COVID in November and I never became symptomatic.
Both masks and Vitamin D are helpful and those at risk or in areas of great spread should consider both. This is similar to masks and face shields offering a multiplier effect. The big difference is that sufficient Vitamin D levels are strongly correlated with numerous metrics of good health including immune, metabolic, and muscle-skeletal system measures.
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.
As someone who first learned that healthy Vitamin D levels were known to decrease respiratory illness severity (regardless if they help with COVID) I have mixed feelings about the repeated front-page posts. On one hand, I think it's useful information to know. On the other hand, it starts feeling a little weird. Like that person you knew in high school who claimed that some marijuana product cured basically any illness. It feels like it makes it lose credibility.
Be careful not to conflated this letter with studies. If 142 letters were posted, I'd be right there with you. AFAIK(I haven't checked them all) the other links are mostly studies.
I have doubts about some of these "mask wearing" studies too. I'm still wearing a mask. I'm still taking Vitamin D. These are low-risk interventions. I'm not going to wait for some p value to get smaller to take action.
Since most mask studies are done in high/extended exposure environments like hospitals, they are not the best model for most people’s use.
This summer, the state of Kansas did an (inadvertent) infield experiment where some counties implemented mask mandates and other counties did not. After a few week, the non-mask mandate counties infection rates increased rapidly. The mask mandate counties’ infection rate increased on slightly.
Turns out that if you pick slightly different start and end dates, you can get dramatically different results.
Even if you think there’s a justification for it, plotting the counties’ data next to each other shows that they’re torturing the data. That is a perfect example of the horrible, flawed methodology that has been getting published all year.
The mechanism by which masks would reduce transmission has been repeatedly studied in a laboratory environment, so in the absence of a properly designed randomized control trial, the prior should be that it works. Instead, in this thread, you have cherry picked tortured data and used flawed methodologies to say that they don't work. Saying that there are similar poor studies on the other side does not update my prior.
I have “cherry picked“ nothing. That’s the data from the study. The researchers picked the start date, arbitrarily, to produce the outcome they liked. It’s obvious.
By the way: there was a randomized controlled trial for masks and covid published just recently. They were able to detect no statistically significant protective effect:
Nothing is stopping anyone from doing what they think makes sense to them -- scientific studies should still be just that though, following sound principles to be able to draw realistic conclusions. If we use flawed studies to convince others that something is true, that doesn't seem fine to me.
Most studies are flawed. We don't know that Vitamin D works. We also don't know that it doesn't work.
Therefore, we need to consider either possibilities. Given that it is such a low-risk intervention, even a 99% chance that Vitamin D doesn't work would make supplementing worthwhile.
No offense, but this logic makes no sense to me. It's like, most studies are flawed so let's try random things I saw on the internet in hopes they might help. I don't get it. Don't really care if someone takes Vitamin D but don't get this argument/logic. That's ok, I'll move on.
It's not "a random thing on the internet". The Vitamin D correlation has been observed early in the pandemic. Most people are generally deficient and should supplement either way.
I'm not sure what aspect of the "mask wearing" you doubt, but I don't have much doubt in the germ theory of disease, and I've been suggesting wearing a mask since Feb, because it works against just about every communicable respiratory disease from bacteria to virus (or pollen or asbestos). I'd recommend eye protection for COVID as well, because the eyes (along with the lungs) appear to be a higher risk aerosol entry point than the stomach through the mouth.
Whether vitamin D has any effect is still very much unknown.
"(CNN) World Health Organization officials Monday said they still recommend people not wear face masks unless they are sick with Covid-19 or caring for someone who is sick.
"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday."
Certain institutions seem to use the epistemic standard "if something hasn't been rigorously proven to be a good idea, then you shouldn't do it". It's the kind of logic that, consistently applied, would say you shouldn't use parachutes in skydiving because there haven't been randomized controlled studies establishing their effectiveness. I think this is what incrudible is arguing against.
How did such logic take hold in the first place? My first guess is that it's something like, that's the type of logic that lets them definitively say "you shouldn't take xyz homeopathic remedy" instead of "well, our expert doctor says he doesn't expect it to help but he can't completely rule it out, and there isn't any good evidence that it does work".
The point is that half of all carriers and many of the superspreaders are "asymptomatic" as far as they are concerned so how would you know if you were sick to protect others or yourself. That article sounded fairly idiotic then and still does now. Would you want your surgeon operating on you without a mask? Why not? Should they wash their hands, if they think they're clean?
This, to me, sounds like the people who claim seat belts cause more deaths than they prevent because they think "being thrown clear of the car" in an accident is safer than being inside during the crash.
I wash my mask with soap after every use, and let it dwell in the soap for half a minute or so. When the weather is right for it, I leave it in the sun to dry. I have a small collection of masks that I rotate through. How infrequently do you disinfect your mask that you worry about it being a petri dish?
Secondly, those gross things you mention at the end were already inside your mouth and lungs. If they are infectious, you probably already have the infection.
I've been following all the COVID related studies (via /r/COVID19, which is one of very few Reddit subs I've found worthwhile) and there is an incredible abundance of garbage studies about COVID19 in general. Tiny sample sizes and ridiculous methodologies run wild. It's unfortunate because some of them get reported on by lazy media and muddy the waters on several things that might reduce the diseases severity.
I hope some bored science writer someday makes a book compiling and critiquing some of the ridiculous "studies" that got written during the pandemic.
I appreciated the linked article's subtle shade-throwing:
> As for Vitamin D administration to hospitalized COVID-19 patients reducing ICU admission, the best one can say about the Córdoba study is that nothing can be learned from it.
I have no way to judge. But I know the normal recovery rate for COVID19 is high. I also know a lot of patients are advised to take Vitamin-D supplement now. So it's hard to say if Vitamin-D is really helping or not without proper test on large group of patients with same validation methods that they use for vacines.
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.
Thanks for the explanation, I'll look into the sources which you cited so the credibility was very apparent, just not the domain which you've cleared up for me.
I mean - there's more truth to this than people want to admit.
It's a harsh way to phrase that it's practically abusive to make people live at certain latitudes where they can't absorb the amount of sun that creates vitamin-d adequate for their body.
Of course the way to combat this is just identifying deficiency and prescribing the right amount.
Yeah I wouln't trust Amazon for supplements. Your local pharmacy or grocery store can probably deliver it or have it available for contact-less pickup.
Probably because Amazon is at this point well known for shipping counterfit products. That's dangerous when it concerns phone chargers. It's downright negligent for supplements if you ask me.
Suppliment maker/seller here. I agree, its a surprisingly shady business. However many store/drogery brands too have their flaws. Big brand suppliments often contain cheaper chemical alternatives, while smaller brands sometimes really care about the actual source product.
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.