COVID-19 Outbreak Information Updates (Reboot) [over 150.000,000 US cases (est.), 6,422,520 US hospitilizations, 1,148,691 US deaths.]

Goatman Saint said

Way back in once upon a time time there was talk of the vitamin D correlation to severe Covid. Glad to see they are making that connection stronger and hopefully moving it towards more mainstream. Vitamin D supplementation is super cheap, and if that’s one thing that can help, why not

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I kind of had it in my head that connection was already well established, because you're right, there was a lot of talk about it early on, there's been a lot of research published since the start (mixed, but overall pretty compelling) and enough compelling evidence early on for the NHS here to give a free fourth-month supply of vitamin D supplements to people at high risk from Covid-19 over winter 20/21.

But now I look, they didn't repeat that for this winter. My guess is they decided vaccination was sufficient, and possibly thought if they pushed vitamin D some proportion of people would mistakenly think vitamin D was an equal alternative to vaccination, rather than something complementary to reducing risk. Looks a lot like more of the 'vaccine only' approach, which I disagree with; vaccines are effective, and combining them with other measures adds more protection. Good communication can minimise the risk of people making bad decisions due to confusion.

Hopefully as the evidence becomes more compelling we'll see better messaging about it, since on the face of that evidence and some other recent studies, it could be saving lives.