From Joseph Mercola, DO
Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, it became apparent that vitamin D played an important role and could help reduce incidence of positive tests, infection severity and the risk of hospitalization and death.
The evidence of benefit was so clear, I published a scientific review in the journal Nutrients at the end of October 2020, co-written with William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel.
This paper, “Evidence Regarding Vitamin D and Risk of COVID-19 and Its Severity” — which you can download and read for free — ended up being the second-most downloaded Nutrients paper in the 12 months following its publication.
The study with the most downloads that year and the all-time highest number of views (178,562) for any Nutrients paper was another vitamin D study by Bhattoa et.al., which found vitamin D supplementation reduced the risk of both influenza and COVID-19 infections and deaths. One of the coauthors of my paper, Grant, was a coauthor on this paper as well.
Several other vitamin D papers topped the lists of views, downloads and citations as well, which was a testament to the fact that many were in fact paying attention to the data rather than blindly believing media claims that there was “no scientific basis” for the recommendation of vitamin D for COVID.
Since then, mounting data have continued to support and strengthen the recommendation of vitamin D against COVID. One of the most recent pieces of evidence is a paper that assessed the effectiveness of vitamin D supplementation for the prevention of COVID-19 in frontline health care workers, published in the June 2022 issue of Archives of Medical Research.
