There is a long history of Vitamin D deficiency being linked to cancer, heart disease, respiratory infection, stroke, diabetes, and death. For a detailed discussion of the subject see the blog post: Vitamin D - The evidence
> "We now have results for over 1500 RCTs on Vitamin D supplementation. Some of the largest and most significant trials are listed and summarized at the end of this article. When tested on its ability to prevent disease, Vitamin D has failed to live up to expectations."
Thousands of peer reviewed research papers have been published that Vitamin D does truly work for cancer and stroke etc and all the above. But then, as the blog points out, none of the claims held once bigger and properly designed RCTs were performed. The only disease provably cured by Vitamin D supplementation was ... Vitamin D deficiency.
Hence I am quite skeptical here as well. The eagerness to embrace Vitamin D as a silver bullet is no different than that of Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine.
It is not that simple to cure COVID - people dearly wish it were hence they want to believe.
It's proactive, not reactive treatment for a disease. It's part of being healthy in the first place, which prevents developing severe COVID, cancer, heart disease, respiratory infection, stroke, diabetes, and death. It's like a car, you give it oil and maintenance to prevent engine damage, you don't give it oil to fix engine damage.
Acting like binging on Vitamin D is supposed to suddenly cure any of those diseases is a complete misunderstanding how all this works. You can greatly reduce your likelihood of severe COVID and 100 other serious/fatal diseases through simple lifestyle changes, but they're not cures for those diseases. And fixing vitamin D deficiency shouldn't mean you take more pills, it should mean you get more exercise out in the Sun.
Also, if vitamin D deficiency is an underlying cause of severe COVID, that would explain the enormous racial inequality for hospitalization and deaths rates. All these things are linked to the amount of melanin in one's skin. The hospitalization and death rates for COVID are double for people with Native American and African blood, and both groups have much higher rates of Vitamin D deficiency.
Right, but the GP-linked study disagrees with your assertion:
“ We now have results for over 1500 RCTs on Vitamin D supplementation. Some of the largest and most significant trials are listed and summarized at the end of this article. When tested on its ability to prevent disease, Vitamin D has failed to live up to expectations."
The 1500 RCT's are actually only 31 studies from what I can see. Those studies are do not all overlap either, they are all over the spectrum (D3 and flu, D3 and mortality, D3 and having children with Asthma).
While good sources for specifics, there is a lot of wiggle room for follow up in some of these spaces where the results amount to a single study.
I think the summaries speak for themselves:
> "Vitamin D ... ... did reduce cancer death by 16%"
> "Vitamin D did not reduce the risk of cancer"
Seems like more research is needed here in these specific areas along with what exact version of D3 we are talking about (they are not all manufactured or extracted the same) and if supporting nutrients/lifestyles effect anything.
I think the article just makes the good point that D3 isn't the magic bullet to any and all sickness without really being able to specify with a high level of certainly what it does help with.
Part of the issue is that many vitamin and other health indicators are highly correlated with other things like income status, race, and other significant conflating factors.
D3 also is related to being outside , which would influence the means of infection: lower initial viral load changes outcome.
The title is quite something. The part that made it here seems reasonable enough, as it can be understood as "higher D3 levels help in not dying as much as with lower D3 levels" which is possible.
The other half is "a Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved at 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D3" which the abstract argues for because "Regression suggested a theoretical point of zero mortality at approximately 50 ng/mL D3."
Someone sent in the clowns. (after that abstract I'm not sure I want to check out the details)
That article is just a load of snark. It starts off my claiming that Vitamin D is suggested as a cure for all kinds of things, but the science shows that low Vitamin D levels are correlated with various diseases. There is a huge difference between saying low levels should be avoided in order to reduce disease and claiming that there is a cure. Not being able to tell the difference shows a lack of interest or understanding in the basic science involved. Railing against purported false claims is a rhetorical tactic and it is worth noting there are no citations for any of the claimed cure claims.
And the science involved is quite complex as recent studies have suggested that people can become resistant to Vitamin D in a way that mirrors insulin sensitivity. This means that serum levels vary in ways that are very much not directly related to supplementation, especially dietary supplementation.
In any case getting distracted by the "Regression SUGGESTED a THEORETICAL zero point of mortality ..." remark doesn't make sense because even Vitamin D enthusiasts rarely sustain levels much above 40.
I agree, that they even have a dosage at which they predict zero deaths is nothing short of ludicrous. It gives away that they authors are unqualified.
D3 (and a bunch of other vitamins) might just be a proxy for simply good nutrition or even just wealth. If your D3 levels are alright, maybe everything else in your health is alright?
Its certain correlated with disability. Those who are chronically ill wont be getting out into the sun as much and tend to have low Vitamin D. It is a well known proxy for overall health.
There are relatively few dietary sources of Vitamin D, fatty fish and fortified foods being the main sources. It is quite possible to eat a healthy diet and be deficient in Vitamin D if you do not eat these foods. The principal source of Vitamin D is exposure to sunlight on bare skin and people at northern latitudes cannot get sufficient exposure during the winter.
Yes, but unfortunately there is a genetic element which has been disentangled with regard to vitamin d production otherwise. I.e. certain minorities in the developed world have good otherwise health but poor vit-d due to the production being related to absorbed sunlight through the skin
Yep. Now is that related to overall wealth of people with low vit-d. Or is it linked to other factors like genetic heritage?
The extreme low cases of vit-d in developed nations tends to have a genetic component or other health thing. But the genetic link I think has been disentangled from overall affluence. I.e. certain people if they take vit-d supplements can improve their overall health.
yes, I think you are onto something, for ever research paper they need to properly disentangle and normalize the various effects - controlling the factors.
Sounds like disentangling vitamin D levels is much more difficult than say controlling for social status, or income, age etc.
The statement is broadly that this is not intended as a treatment but offers a useful way of deciding how likely a patient is to not respond to initial therapy.
I don't think a sensible person is suggesting a massive dose of vitamin d on a arrival is a cure.
As for the consequence of is the deficiency linked to poor otherwise health that is interesting to disentangle.
This does offer a very good explanation to the idiotic statements of "covid is racist". I.e. if it is linked to vit-d deficiency it offers a way to reduce deaths in minorities.
These early concerns suggested that covid would hit Africa for instance really badly, and it is yet to do so.
RCTs are great, but they are almost always underpowered when studying nutritional deficiencies.
For the cited study, the cancer incidence rate was 1.2% in 5 years among 12500 recipients. That's barely 150 patients. Getting statistically significant effects with such low sample sizes is very difficult.
We will have to live with correlational instead of causal studies for nutrition. If you are interested, smoking causes lung cancer hypothesis was based on correlation- which was how cigarette manufacturers attacked the hypothesis. Proving a causal connection between smoking and cancer is much more difficult.
The studies mentioned are for supplementation. I'd be interested to see studies on vitamin D benefits through sunlight exposure instead. It may be that these studies are proving not that increasing vitamin D levels can prevent disease, but that supplementation is ineffective.
For what it’s worth, I had a physical in my mid-20s where my doctor saw my vitamin D levels were low, so he told me to supplement with vitamin D. I take 10,000 IU with vitamin K about 5x/week. I am 35 now and I happened to check my levels around Jan 2020, to make sure I wasn’t overdoing it. I was at 53 ng/mL, which was perfect.
The pandemic came around, and while a lot of people around me got sick, I never did, but I had also been good about mask adherence. So I was a little surprised in August 2020 when my doctor gave me a COVID antibody test (blood draw), just to see, had come back positive, considering I had felt completely fine through that whole period.
Then again a few months later, when my SO came down with covid, needless to say we had extremely close contact during the infectious period, and I was still completely fine.
I’m not trying to be a vitamin D evangelist or anything, of course I could just be one of the lucky ones when it comes to covid, but I feel like it’s a cheap and easy thing to try if you aren’t currently supplementing. And of course, I am vaccinated as well now.
RE: your last sentence. High dose supplementation of vitamin D should be done after consulting with your doctor (like you did). As a fat soluble vitamin, our bodies sometimes struggle to dispose of the excess. Therefore a person with "normal" vitamin D levels who begins supplementing at high levels is potentially risking some side effects. It's always good to be monitored in situations like those.
It seems you are doing exactly that, which is great.
> I take 10,000 IU with vitamin K about 5x/week. I am 35 now and I happened to check my levels around Jan 2020, to make sure I wasn’t overdoing it. I was at 53 ng/mL, which was perfect.
As a counter example, I took 5,000 IU per day and almost ended up over the 100ng/dL upper limit. I had to reduce my supplementation to avoid overdose.
Vitamin D supplementation is very person-dependent, so I recommend anyone supplementing with higher dose supplements (5000IU and up) check their blood levels every few years.
I have been collecting studies related to treatment and prevention of the common cold for a while now. Every time I have a cold, I spend some time growing the list.
So far, Vitamin D3 is one of the more promising treatments in the list.
Here are two interesting RCTs regarding Vitamin D and respiratory tract infections:
An interesting implication of all this is that the authoritarian measures used to manage the pandemic are effectively a subsidy. Those who are young or healthy or have a nutritionally balanced diet are taking on pains (lockdowns, mandates) to create a lower risk situation for everyone else. Personally I feel it is better for governments to provide education and strong guidance, but to ultimately favor individual choice and stay away from top down measures. With COVID, those who are young have incredibly low IFR to begin with, and they could have gone about their lives and built up antibodies naturally, which would then make it safer for everyone else anyways.
The main point of restrictions was to reduce case numbers coming into hospitals and overwhelming them, since COVID patients who do get hospitalized tend to stay there a long time.
If you are a young person who gets into a car crash and you need immediate treatment in the ER, an overwhelmed hospital might either mean sending an injured person into a place crowded with COVID patients, or scrambling to find a hospital that has room. Even now there are still US hospitals turning away ambulances due to lack of capacity.
> and they could have gone about their lives and built up antibodies naturally, which would then make it safer for everyone else anyways.
“Built up antibodies naturally” is a coy way of saying kill the maximum number of people possible before reaching herd immunity.
Given the rapid pace of vaccine development, strict measures to slow the spread of the virus seemed reasonable. Some countries, like New Zealand and Taiwan, will largely escape the pandemic unscathed.
> “Built up antibodies naturally” is a coy way of saying kill the maximum number of people possible before reaching herd immunity.
This is absurd in the extreme. The proposition was that those that are the least impacted by covid--specifically, those like me who are healthy, young, getting adequate sunlight--should not have to bear the responsibility for those who are vulnerable.
Covid risk for people like me, and us healthy folk are a great large chunk of the population, is less than a typical flu.
Since we don't have as extreme policy responses to the flu, do you characterize that as well as "kill the maximum number of people possible"?
And saying that New Zealand came through unscathed I guess just shows how differently we think. The society has come to accept being forced into isolation, accept quarantines and curfews like their unruly teenagers, accept all manner of tyranny--to you, they're unscathed because they have fewer covid-related deaths. To me, covid-related deaths--which are dwarfed still in the USA by heart disease and cancer and other ailments, don't even rise to the level of general concern.
Then again, I live in Montana. Everyone doesn't care. Only on the internet and talking to Canadian or coastal friends does it come up. Around here, you say covid, and a lot of folks probably think it's a migratory bird--then again, hunting season just opened up.
And with all us ignoring this crazy pandemic, you know what? The world's not ending. No vaccine mandates. No mask mandates. Everyone's "unscathed".
> Covid risk for people like me, and us healthy folk are a great large chunk of the population, is less than a typical flu.
Is it? There sure seem to be a lot of long-term side-effects with covid that people do not get from the “flu” (and IMO most people say they had the “flu” when really what they had was a cold.)
> Everyone’s “unscathed”
JFC. 17 covid deaths a day this week, and everyone is “unscathed”? What a terrible and false claim to have made.
I won’t dwell on the thousands—likely tens of thousands, based on the state’s cases—of your fellow citizens who didn’t die, they’re just permanently disabled. “Unscathed.” Wow.
> This is absurd in the extreme. The proposition was that those that are the least impacted by covid--specifically, those like me who are healthy, young, getting adequate sunlight--should not have to bear the responsibility for those who are vulnerable.
We have radically different values.
Of course the strongest and most able in society have to bear the majority of the burdens. That simply seems morally obvious. The rich should pay more taxes than the poor. The young and healthy fight in the military and not the old and infirm. Adult children will make personal sacrifices to save their elderly parents. What about asking the healthy to make sacrifices to protect the weak is unjust?
A world view of “let the weak fend for themselves for the strong should take what they want” is utterly repugnant.
How are kids bearing responsibility? It seems to me kids are doing fine with social distancing, mask wearing and all. Parents complain about their kids masking up more than the kids do.
But the ultimate way kids are being forced to bear responsibility is their parents dying from covid and leaving them as orphans.
> Some countries, like New Zealand and Taiwan, will largely escape the pandemic unscathed
You've been lied to. It's an endemic disease which 100% of the population will eventually get. It's just that with vaccines a lot fewer older people will die, and a lot fewer middle aged people will experience health issues for an extended period of time. Before vaccines came to market, I could understand what they're doing, but now it doesn't make any sense: they're just postponing the inevitable - the only way out is through. They should vaccinate as many people as they can and remove all restrictions.
This was an observation amongst the vast sea of observations for over a year and a half. It still needed to be studied.
A year and a half ago, and partly even now, the kneejerk response has been "ah, it must be because people with low Vitamin D are doing other inactive things with poor diets and low sunlight" as opposed to something closer to "Vitamin D supplements are a cheap existing solution for a reason we still don't know yet"
Or it could be because the grandparent post contains the common non-sequitur about "individual choice". That rhetoric is pointless in a discussion about public health and ruins a perfectly good comment. An infectious disease does not care what your individual choice is.
It's obviously not a non sequitur, it's the essential tradeoff we're making. We could weld every person into their home for the next month and eliminate Covid, but we don't do that because we're trading off public health maximalism vs individual freedoms. The entire point of the political process is to decide where that line is.
An infectious disease doesn't care about any of that, it doesn't care what your political process is or where you draw the line. It's not a trade off of public health maximalism vs individual freedoms, it never is that simple. Every decision you make there trades someone else's individual freedom by increasing their risk of contracting the disease. Please let's stop dancing around that and trying to play politics here.
The only fool proof solution that exists is to totally quarantine people, but the grandparent post already took that off the table, so even if we wanted to have that discussion there is simply nowhere left for it to go. See what I mean here? This rhetoric doesn't do anything besides shut down the conversation.
No I am not, please stop this. You're jumping to the other extreme and that's exactly why I think that type of rhetoric is not helpful. If you have something nuanced you'd like to say then I'd love to hear it.
Personally if I was somewhere where there was an HIV outbreak, and we didn't have adequate resources to test and protect against it, then I would say that abstaining from promiscuous sex and promoting that as a public health measure would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. That would actually probably help the situation in areas of the world where the ongoing HIV epidemic is particularly bad, which by the way is still a real thing.
Started taking high levels of d3 a few months before covid, as I had very low levels. (Autoimmune)
A year later and I got covid. A few scary nights. I recovered but had a sharp increase in micro-clotting. Something that was an issue before Covid. I had to double blood thinners to keep symptoms under control. Took six months before I could lower dosage again.
Covid aside I’m much healthier since upping d3. I had been bed ridden with uncontrollable migraines the year prior.
D3 might be a proxy for age, as I thought older folks were to take D and Calcium to reduce the chance of osteoporosis. It might also be a proxy for overall health, as those short of D3 are probably not eating "well-balanced diets, ..." that marketeers are fond of talking about. It's also possible that it has a direct effect on the result, which would (as mentioned already) make it an excellent complement of vaccination. One reduces the chance of the ultimate problem, one reduces the chance of duration/problems. And it's cheap.
From the second paragraph in the abstract, it seems that they adjust for age: "Mortality rates from clinical studies were corrected for age, sex, and diabetes."
Does it adjust for other vitamins? People with sufficient vitamin D levels likely take supplements along with other vitamins so it may be that it's not just vitamin D, but it in combination with other vitamins. If this study just gave people vitamin D supplements and nothing else then it may be that it didn't have needed "supporting vitamins".
People with sufficient Vitamin D levels may also spend more time outdoors. For some, this may indicate more exercise as well. The primary source of Vitamin D naturally is sun exposure. So lifestyle factors other than eating play a large role, like time outdoors, and how far north one lives.
Had not considered this - it's a good point. There is a lot of fortified food in the N American, possibly Western European diet which includes D3 (particularly for milk drinkers). But milk drinking is limited to particular gene families as I thought it was a (quite) recent mutation...
But I would expect older people taking D3 for (pre)osteoporosis would generally be high risk for COVID. I know this thread is overflowing with anecdotal information but two family members in their sixties had completely asymptotic covid infections. Neither was generally healthy (obesity in one, asthma in the other) but both supplemented with Vitamin D3.
Figure 2 in their paper [0] shows the mechanism via which (as they say) vitamin D3 is supposed to improve outcomes of a Covid19 infection. It seems to counteract the negative effects on ACE2 levels that a Covid19 infection has which seem to be responsible for bad outcomes.
"...what made the people with high vitamin D levels so healthy was not the vitamin itself. That was just a marker. Their vitamin D levels were high because they were getting plenty of exposure to the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above."
There have been a bunch of other studies on vitamin D and COVID-19. Before jumping to conclusions and commenting here I recommend reviewing the existing literature.
As a reminder, you can use the D Minder Pro app to estimate your daily vitamin D intake from sun exposure. It was free during the first year of the pandemic, right now it costs $1.99.
The Apple Watch (or any other smart watch) should have a built-in sun measuring sensor, noting when people have not enough sun exposure to produce the necessary amount of Vitamin D to be healthy. Once AR is there, they could make a game out of it, showing progress bars at the peripery of the eyes. This could make reaching the targets much easier for a lot more people.
That's fine. As long as the sensor is available the user can expose it. I think this is a pretty cool idea, and would yield more accurate measurements than estimating based off of latitude and cloud coverage alone. Albeit it'll all but guarantee tan lines.
When the "bradykinin storm" hypothesis [1] was postulated, I already guessed that D3 would be a potent suppressor of Covid-19 mortality & likely prevention of the "Long Covid" syndrome.
Human beings have been living in europe for over 100,000 years. White skin doesn't seem to be older than a 10,000 years (see the skin analysis of the first briton). I don't think it would have taken so much time to evolve white skin had it really had the importance that is being attributed to it nowadays. I am very skeptical about its importance on preventing not only covid but also many other deseases.
Anything that kills you mostly only after prime child-birthing years does not matter to evolution, and human behavior and diet has changed just a bit over the last 10000 years.
> Anything that kills you mostly only after prime child-birthing years does not matter to evolution
That's...very much not true. Any disease that doesn't effect the chances of children closely related to the exposed person being born and surviving to adulthood does not matter much to evolution, but killing the exposed person before or during prime childbearing years isn't the only way to effect that.
Another useful aspect of death as a metric, is that it is the most widely reported (as compared to, say, maximum fever, amount of ventilation required, days in hospital, lasting anosmia, etc. etc.)
For the overwhelming majority of people that is the only bad outcome. Severe conditions like ARDS are rare, but also correlate with Vitamin D deficiency even outside of the pandemic (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25903964/). As for other symptoms that are being lumped together under the label “long COVID”, their incidence seems low, the severity is usually low, and nearly all conditions disappear over time. Some have suggested that perhaps those lingering effects are no different than a typical cold or flu, except this time we are all focused on this issue and noticing these things.
Personally I am not convinced that the young and heathy need to treat COVID specially. This is a pandemic of the old and unhealthy more than anything.
I think the “why take chances” logic can be applied in multiple ways though. The risks from COVID are incredibly low for the young and healthy, and even lower if you consider just those with balanced diets (without VDD). It’s difficult to compare the tradeoffs between multiple competing low risk choices. Why take chances with a new vaccine that could prove to have some long term effect? Why take chances with shutting down schools and impacting children for a lifetime? Why take chances with the lower oxygen and breathing difficulties of masks? And so on. It makes more sense for individuals to evaluate their risk tolerance and circumstances to decide which tradeoffs they are willing to take on.
People are very bad at estimating risks using their gut feelings. They overestimate low probabilities and underestimating high.
Did you know that polio is survivable in 99.8% of cases and asymptomatic in 92% (up to 99% by some estimates) of cases?
So, was it worth inventing a vaccine for it? Or taking it? Risking long term effects?
About long term effect of mRNA vaccines... you know what has long term effects? Covid.
And if anyone read about mRNA technology for an afternoon it would be painfully obvious to them that whatever super long term effects covid vaccines might have, covid will virtually surely cause them as well, because mRNA vaccines don't do anything else than covid does. And don't fool yourself that you don't get covid. Unless you are planning to die of something else soon. I will not get covid is as silly as saying I won't get neither flu nor cold before I die, even asymptomatically.
> It makes more sense for individuals to evaluate their risk tolerance and circumstances to decide which trade-offs they are willing to take on.
No, it doesn't, because people actively avoid available knowledge in their personal risk estimations. So their estimation of both the risk and their willingness to take on risks is estimated wrong.
Did you hear about a single person dying in hospital from covid saying, "we'll maybe I'm dying but I'm proud of my decision to not get vaccinated, not supporting mask wearing" or whatever? Because plenty of such people recognized they were horribly wrong in their estimations.
I did read the recent discussion on HN around polio, and it does bring up some interesting questions as you’ve noted. But polio’s effects were more prevalent. The WHO says (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/poliomyelit...) that 1 in 200 infected with polio experience irreversible paralysis (usually the legs), and 5-10% of those with paralysis die, meaning the IFR was 0.025%. The IFR for COVID-19 is incredibly low for those under 50, as most of the deaths impacted senior citizens. Even the CDC's conservative planning scenarios (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...) use a planning IFR for minors of 20 in 1M infections (0.002%) - which is an order of magnitude less than polio.
A big part of what made polio’s vaccine acceptance easy was the graphic imagery of children being afflicted with a lifetime of paralysis. There was a certain psychological impact on society from that imagery. People evaluated the risks and decided they were better off going with the vaccine. Another boost for vaccine confidence was that the vaccines used approaches a that were already in wide use in other vaccines.
> About long term effect of mRNA vaccines... you know what has long term effects? Covid.
The risks of long term effects with COVID are very low, and their severity is very low, and in almost all cases those symptoms disappear. So why is your desire to contain one type of low risk any more important than others’ desire to contain other types of low risk?
Regarding mRNA vaccines - I don’t think you are seeing things the way the vaccine hesitant are. The mRNA vaccine can have long term effects we don’t understand. Just because we are focused on its mechanism for efficacy doesn’t meant here aren’t other possible mechanisms involved that we haven’t understood yet. Likewise, we don’t know if any of the other vaccine ingredients will have long-term effects. The mRNA vaccine doses are not solely composed of mRNA material and lipids. And certainly we’ve seen numerous products - both medical and non-medical - banned decades after their initial introduction. The risks of that are low, but it’s nonzero. And I shouldn’t have to say this, but in case it helps make my points more acceptable, I am vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine as is my entire family.
> Did you hear about a single person dying in hospital from covid saying, "we'll maybe I'm dying but I'm proud of my decision to not get vaccinated, not supporting mask wearing" or whatever? Because plenty of such people recognized they were horribly wrong in their estimations.
I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up. This is the exact type of anecdotal risk estimation that you call out a few sentences earlier. I could equally say that the few people who experience severe vaccine side effects may also experience regret. Or that years down the road, it is possible that all those who received [some vaccine] will regret their choice if it is found to cause cancer or something else. The thing is, we don’t really know because we are dealing with the unknown. We don’t understand either the virus or the human body fully. For this and other reasons, I feel it is legitimate for people to choose their own risk profile based on their experiences and gut. I also don’t think anyone should be obligated to undergo a medical procedure like vaccination against their will, because bodily autonomy is a fundamental civil liberty and because I don’t think here’s an obligation to have to take action to protect others against some third-party agent like a virus.
> The risks of long term effects with COVID are very low, and their severity is very low, and in almost all cases those symptoms disappear.
How can you possibly know that, if no person in the world contacted covid more than 2 years ago? How do you know it won't lead to lung cancer in 5 or 10 or 20 years? Or to brain tumors? This virus can linger in the body. And we know of cancers caused by viruses.
If you claim that you can't rule out long term side effects of mRNA vaccines, you can't claim that you can rule out long term effects of covid.
> So why is your desire to contain one type of low risk any more important than others’ desire to contain other types of low risk?
One is scientifically estimated to be orders of magnitude less than other. But that's not why you vaccinate. You vaccinate to avoid immediate danger of covid. Yes. It's rather survivable by young people, but not everybody is young and even youngish people have very significant risks of severe outcomes. Also you vaccinate to reduce the amount of opportunities virus has to evolve into some nastier version.
> Regarding mRNA vaccines - I don’t think you are seeing things the way the vaccine hesitant are.
I'm definitely not seeing it like them because I know enough about how cells, vaccines and viruses work.
> The mRNA vaccine can have long term effects we don’t understand.
It can have at worst the effect that a (covid) virus might have. mRNA vacc don't do anything that any virus that replicates inside human body routinely doesn't do. And viruses do way more weird DNA and RNA rewriting tricks than mRNA vaccines were ever accused of possibly having.
You have no biological reason to be afraid mRNA vaccines having long term effect than you have whenever you are exposed to one of hundreds of mild (or not so mild) viruses.
> Just because we are focused on its mechanism for efficacy doesn’t meant here aren’t other possible mechanisms involved that we haven’t understood yet.
You can say that about anything. You can't be totally sure that by exiting the window of your apartment this time you won't float gently to the ground by some not yet understood possible mechanism. It's just really unlikely.
And it's also unlikely that covid vaccines will have any long term effect that the covid itself won't have.
> Likewise, we don’t know if any of the other vaccine ingredients will have long-term effects.
I don't think the mRNA vaccines contain any ingredient that haven't been researched for what happens when it's injected into the body. It would be insane to include substance of unknown effect to be the part of this product.
> And certainly we’ve seen numerous products - both medical and non-medical - banned decades after their initial introduction.
There are larger number of sets of competent eyes on this vaccines than anytime ever on those recalled products. Because pandemic is kind of a big deal.
> The risks of that are low, but it’s nonzero.
According to quantum physics probability of rarely anything is exactly zero. Risk of taking covid vaccine is practically zero. And surely magnitudes of order lower than risk of getting in contact with sars-cov-2.
> but in case it helps make my points more acceptable, I am vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine as is my entire family.
I'm sorry but it does not. It makes it even worse, because while you are happily enjoying benefits of safe vaccine you are publishing misleading opinions that might cause someone to avoid the vaccine and be exposed to all risks of meeting sars-cov-2 without any preparation. Next time lead with that information. It should help your readers understand your position. But not make it more acceptable.
> > Did you hear about a single person dying in hospital from covid saying
> I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up.
To illustrate that people are grievously wrong in their risk estimates and shouldn't be forced (or trusted) to rely on them if scientific knowledge on the subject exists. "Let everybody do their own math" is a horrible idea.
> I could equally say that the few people who experience severe vaccine side effects may also experience regret.
The thing is there are no such people because any research so far that points out to any possible side effects of mRNA vaccine is not conclusive. Which tells you something given that billions of people already took the vaccine. I'm sure there are a lot of people that experience some health issues after they took the vaccine and many might wrongly regret taking it. If the vaccine caused them, they'd have them when they contract covid too.
And those rare cases of people with anaphylactic shock often don't regret their decision to take the vaccine because it was properly informed decision.
> Or that years down the road, it is possible that all those who received [some vaccine] will regret their choice if it is found to cause cancer or something else.
Again. If people who took covid vaccine will ever get cancer because of it, then people who contracted covid will get double cancer because their bodies experienced the same thing that vaccinated bodies did, only may times stronger plus additional viral proteins that vaccine didn't contain the mRNA for.
> The thing is, we don’t really know because we are dealing with the unknown. We don’t understand either the virus or the human body fully.
Yes. Especially with covid. We don't fully understand how it does all the things it does though we understand quite a bit already. And we can only hope that we will be able to mitigate the harm.
But we shouldn't throw hands in the air, reject what we already know about virology, immunology, vaccinology and exclaim that "nature works in mysterious way". New things might be dangerous, that's why we gather knowledge. To estimate risks properly.
If we wanted to eliminate all the risks we wouldn't use agriculture yet because who knows what harm eating intentionally grown food might do in the long run.
> I feel it is legitimate for people to choose their own risk profile based on their experiences and gut.
It's a legitimate recipe for disaster. People don't have knowledge or skill to arrive at better decision this way instead of just listening to a knowledgeable person.
> I also don’t think anyone should be obligated to undergo a medical procedure like vaccination against their will, because bodily autonomy is a fundamental civil liberty
That's a good sentiment, and I wish we are able to keep it wholesale. But unless more people will make correct decision out of their properly informed free will vaccinations in times of pandemic become an exception to this bodily autonomy.
Also other people civil liberty and bodily autonomy would mean that they shouldn't be required to take additional risks by interacting with people that refuse to get vaccinated. Same way you have right to refuse dining in a place where people with hepatitis prepare the meals.
> I don’t think here’s an obligation to have to take action to protect others against some third-party agent like a virus
Virus is not an agent. It's just a part of our environment.
In my country you are legally required to help traffic accidents victims.
I just read that in USA there is no such obligation unless you caused the danger or are in some relation to people in danger. What's more you can get sued for honest attempt at helping. Which is just bizarre.
Fixed that for you: How can you possibly know that, if no person in the world had the MRNA vaccine more than 2 years ago?
And, claiming that the worst _possible_ effect of the vaccines are cold-like symptoms is outright deception. The numbers are a small minority, but there are bad possible effects like ITP and other immune reactions, myocarditis, and other clotting issues, which are happening to _some_ people. We have no way to predict this. Just as we have _zero_ way to predict how severe any individual's infection with COVID-19 will actually be.
It is this tendency to obviously outright lie that makes a lot of people who would not otherwise be "anti-vax" mistrust the current massive push to force everyone to take these new vaccines. Most particularly for those of us who have had the bad luck to have one of these rare reactions to a vaccine in the past. The world dismisses us, but "the minority" still exists, even if they are not you. Every time someone like you blows off these truths, they create more anti-vaxxers out of people who have had a bad reaction to a vaccine or know someone who has.
> How can you possibly know that, if no person in the world had the MRNA vaccine more than 2 years ago?
That's what antivaxxers are asking. I'm not one of them. I ask, how can you know that the fact that you were exposed to covid won't cause cancers or strokes in few years or whatever if nobody had it more than two years ago? And you can skip arguments like it's just a flu because it isn't or that it's natural therefore not that bad as artificial vaccine because it makes your body do way more things it shouldn't do.
> The numbers are a small minority, but there are bad possible effects like ITP and other immune reactions, myocarditis, and other clotting issues, which are happening to _some_ people.
As I said, research whether vaccine raised the probability of those events occuring for those people is inconclusive (because numbers are so small that it's very hard to tell the signal from the noise) and even assuming vaccine had some role in some of these cases there's exacly zero proof that they wouldn't just got the same event or worse once they contracted covid.
> It is this tendency to obviously outright lie that makes a lot of people who would not otherwise be "anti-vax" mistrust the current massive push to force everyone to take these new vaccines.
Nobody lies about this, same way I'm not lying when I say you will not a win a grand prize in powerball lottery. Even though some people do, you won't, and more people die in traffic accidents when they drive to buy their lottery ticket so you have a better chance of that happening.
> Every time someone like you blows off these truths, they create more anti-vaxxers out of people who have had a bad reaction to a vaccine or know someone who has.
Everytime someone pays inordinate amount of attention to such extremely rare cases, when someone got some issue after they took vaccine even though there's no proof it had anything to do with that beyond possible faint correlation, even though there's no possible mechanism of vaccine causing anything that the virus itself wouldn't cause ... whenever you do that you are creating thousands of antivaxxers and cause people to make very bad decisions for themselves, their loved ones and everybody else.
That line of reasoning applies also to simply getting out of bed in the morning, or risking COVID illness without the proven safety benefits of the vaccines, both of which have known long-term side-effects. Whereas, if you are healthy, the vaccine has been abundantly proven to statistically make you more healthy, so what “trade-off” are you talking about?
>Whereas, if you are healthy, the vaccine has been abundantly proven to statistically make you more healthy
This is emphatically false. Immunity to a specific virus does not make a person healthier and the vaccines do have a documented risk of side effects, in addition to rapidly mounting evidence of poor efficacy.
People seem to be worshipping these vaccines as some sort of mystical religious artifacts at this point.
The vaccines do not come without a cost. This is a dangerous myth, even if you think the risks are low.
If a mystical religious artifact magically appeared that was measured to statistically make me less likely to fall sick, I might go worship there too. That is sort of the point of science: finding whatever works best, whether that be my amulet, president Trump, or some chemical mixture. My definition of healthy is “less likely to become ill”. So far, and looking past any rhetoric, I have yet to find a source that shows vaccination to be more likely to cause illness, usually being a couple orders of magnitude safer. Do you have a source for me?
Yes, but everything has a cost. That isn’t a myth, just economics. That doesn’t mean costs are bad.
That's a contrived definition of "healthier". In any case
>I might go worship there too
Therein lies the issue. Worship of science is a vehicle for dogma. Even if the worship is implicit. Science is not beyond reproach, and to presume that laymen are unable to notice inconsistencies or holes in official doctrine is no better than forbidding peasants from reading or interpreting scripture. The same forces are at work, at a time when covid literature is freely available, but only one consensus is socially, morally acceptable. The science is far from settled; it cannot be so quickly after development of a new and complex technology.
It took some 5 years before thalomide was found to cause birth defects. We just injected custom designed partial viral RNA into billions of people. To pretend vehemently that we've solved such a complex problem safely on the first try is hubris, and Pfizer et al are immune from legal liability, as negotiated with the US government.
You think only tobacco and petroleum companies are capable of manipulating data and publishing misleading literature in pursuit of profits? They don't need to outright lie, just gradually massage their models and constantly adjust, and look at that, 2 years into this virus 2 weeks has turned, unironically, into 3 booster shots. There's no reason to blindly trust that these vaccines are safe long term. They'd have a tough time getting approved at all without emergency authorization given the current known side effects.
Nobody thinks Pandemic+Covid shots are better than no Pandemic+no shots. You got to weigh the hypothetical risk of the vaccine with the reported risk of Covid death.
People take this decision thinking it's personal but it's not, it affects many others. Your 'personal' decision to assert medical sovereignty could kill another.
Given the vaccine doesn't stop symptoms or catching it is there a point to what you're saying. Taking vitamin d probably reduces symptoms across the board reducing the need for additional palliative care
So I'm assuming people who down vote assume preventing deaths is achieved through some means that doesn't impact the rest of the course of a disease... I wish we lived in such a simple universe
I think people take offence in you not noticing that vaccines also reduce symptoms and even stop them in some cases. And that this fact has been better proven than any claims of vitamin D effect on covid.
Literally billions of people already took vaccines for covid, some, almost a yer ago. Time to update your mental model.
If you are afraid of covid vaccines long term effects why are you not afraid that covid infection itself will cause some health issues in 5..10 years, for example lung cancers or brain tumors?
We know that some cancers are caused by viruses and we know sars-cov-2 can linger in the body.
This is another long discarded bit of snake oil. If there were genuine home remedies for Covid that you could buy at the grocery store, we'd have told you about it. It turns out there are only two: vaccines and masks. It's healthy to have the recommended amount of Vitamin D, but not at the expense of a vaccine and a mask.
Im bored to death of Covid arguments, but I bet if you had to choose, healthy Vitamin D levels would be more effective than masks both for the individual and society.
Maybe. E.g. most Americans are still ignorant to the effect of obesity on severity, good advice would also include trying to lose a pounds a week, as it would be more effective than cloth masks once you catch it (which everyone will eventually, vaccinated or not)
I just don't understand how anyone could be against studies that basically say being deficient in an essential nutrient might lead to worse health outcomes.
It isn't the water molecules passing through the mask from your mouth. Your body is warmer than the air around you most of the year (unless you live in the tropics). It is mostly the heat of your breath passing through the mask, then hitting the cooler surface of the glasses, and making the moisture in the air that is already outside your mask condense on the glasses.
Water particles absolutely are getting through. Yes the glasses are colder and breathe is warmer but it is still the water vapor from the hot moist breath that is the primary source of the water condensate.
While water particles do pass easily, viruses may not as respiratory aerosols are orders of magnitude larger about 1.6-5um vs. water at 0.27nm
https://www.devaboone.com/post/vitamin-d-part-3-the-evidence...
> "We now have results for over 1500 RCTs on Vitamin D supplementation. Some of the largest and most significant trials are listed and summarized at the end of this article. When tested on its ability to prevent disease, Vitamin D has failed to live up to expectations."
Thousands of peer reviewed research papers have been published that Vitamin D does truly work for cancer and stroke etc and all the above. But then, as the blog points out, none of the claims held once bigger and properly designed RCTs were performed. The only disease provably cured by Vitamin D supplementation was ... Vitamin D deficiency.
Hence I am quite skeptical here as well. The eagerness to embrace Vitamin D as a silver bullet is no different than that of Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine.
It is not that simple to cure COVID - people dearly wish it were hence they want to believe.