| This is a strange way of titling that article, I think. Not very responsible journalism, but I get that this is the kind of title that generates clicks. Vitamin D doesn't "fight" COVID directly. Vitamin D plays a critical role in the body's immune system. So the immune system is what is important, and vitamin D in theory is a kind of loose proxy for how well your immune system might mount a response. The study itself is a correlation study with a relatively small number of patients... (not that I'm dismissing these types of studies, they have value), and it is in line with what I described above. If you have low vit D levels (for various reasons), your risk of severe covid increases. That's kind of where the study ends. The study is basic and observational-- it does not show that supplementing with vit D (or consuming foods high in vit D) prevents COVID or improves health outcomes. You'd need a different kind of study for that-- a far more rigorous one. It's probably ok to speculate that normal/healthy vit D levels might indicate better immune resiliance vs covid, given that moderate amounts of supplementation are shown to safely increase serum levels (to a point). But this particular study isn't medical evidence that vit D supplements "fight" covid like a medicine (e.g., Remdesivir) or that vit D is an effective covid strategy worthy of higher prioritization versus other recommendations. Certainly far and away Step #1 is to get vaccinated and boosted. Period. Step #2 is to practice appropriate social distancing/masking, avoiding infected people and crowds. In parallel, over the medium and long term it would be beneficial to improve your health lifestyle factors - diet/weight (including getting all essential nutrients such as vit D), sleep, stress, exercise, avoid smoking/excess alcohol etc. These things take quite a bit of time to reap benefits, a few months at minimum. It's not something you'll achieve rapidly and certainly not once you're infected with covid. But getting these under control will improve your health almost across-the-board. You'll help lower the risk/impact of chronic diseases, improve aging/longevity, improve your immune system, and even lower the risk of serious COVID.
But these are things which should be pursued in parallel to and in addition to Steps 1 and 2. Independently it is not likely to save you from covid if you're in a higher risk category (e.g., over 40 years old especially). And coming back to the misleading title of the article, certainly consuming vitamin D is no covid prophylactic on its own. If you think popping vitamin D or fish oil pills is going to save your ass once you get covid... well you'll likely get about as much benefit from that as you would from thoughts and prayers. Bottom line: For now, embracing vitamins or common-sense lifestyle/wellness tips as a primary covid prevention strategy is at best foolhardy and at worst dangerous and delusional. |
https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/