Here is further research on the need for proper vitamin D3 supplementation to attain at least the 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D (as measured in “vitamin D” blood tests) which the immune system needs to function properly.

This is true of all people - except perhaps those who get so much ultraviolet B skin exposure, all year, every year, that their bodies produce sufficient vitamin D3 cholecalciferol for their livers to hydroxylate into sufficient 25-hydroxyvitamin D (AKA calcifediol or “calcidiol”) to maintain at least 50 nanograms (billionths of a gram) per millilitre (gram) all year round. Such people would arguably be healthier if they reduced their UV-B skin exposure - and so skin-damage and risk of cancer - and supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently to maintain the level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D they need to be healthy.

There’s nowhere near enough vitamin D3 in food, fortified or not, to provide the vitamin D3 we need to be healthy, so full health requires proper vitamin D3 supplementation, or significant long-term and surely harmful levels of UV-B skin exposure, and then somewhat less, or perhaps no, vitamin D3 supplementation.

My very long page vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ cites and discusses dozens of research articles which I believe show, beyond any doubt, that 50 ng/mL should be the minimum level for all people, from birth into old age.

This begins vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-how-much with recommendations from New Jersey based Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa (CV, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School - now Rutgers University) on how much vitamin D3 to supplement to achieve this, without the need for blood tests or medical monitoring. The amount depends on body weight and obesity status, and is applicable to all people, of all ages and body weights who are not subject to medical advice to the contrary.

For 70 kg 154 lb body weight without obesity, 125 micrograms a day, on average, is a good amount. This is 1/8000th of a gram, also known by the rather large number of 5000 IUs, since an IU is 1/40,000,000 of a gram. This is a gram every 22 years.

This is 5 to 8 times more than what governments and many doctors recommend, since they are only seeking to attain about 20 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is sufficient for the kidneys to perform their part in regulating calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. I will write an article suggesting particular vitamin D3 capsules which I think are a good choice, including some which also contain vitamin K2. K2 reducing the risk of excessive levels of calcium in the bloodstream as well as including strengthening immune responses and bone.

In-utero, the child-to-be’s brain is building itself

It is easy to see that in old age, vitamin D3 supplementation is badly needed to protect health generally, and especially to reduce the risk of dementia - though this takes decades to develop and the protection must start in mid-life. Yet most aged people do not supplement vitamin D3 at all.

See: Responsibility for vitamin D supplementation of elderly care home residents in England: falling through the gap between medicine and food Joseph and Carol Williams, BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health 2020-10-12: nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/09/20/bmjnph-2020-000129.

My long page has a section vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3 on research which shows that low 25-hydroxyvitamin D greatly increases the risk of age-related neurodegeneration, including Alzheimer’s disease, and the three closely related movement disorders, which progress to dementia: Parkinson’s disease, multiple system atrophy and dementia with Lewy bodies.

Another section vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2 concerns low 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the mother, and so the fetus and newborn child, increasing the risks of preeclampsia, pre-term-birth, autism, ADHD, mental retardation and psychiatric symptoms in the child between ages 6 and 8.

These sections cover a small but pertinent subset of the research on these matters. Rather than expand them, I am writing Substack articles and linking to them from these sections.

I can’t think of any aspect of life, other than direct attack, more likely to motivate concerned individuals into action than contemplating the child-to-be - the adult, mother, father to be - building his or her own body, cell-by-cell, in Mother’s womb, and being prevented from doing so properly due to toxins, diseases or inadequate nutrition.

Neurons alter their growth patterns with exquisite sensitivity as they interact with other neurons and support cells, to attain shapes and make specific synapses which form the basis for all of the person’s life. Deficiencies in neurodevelopment in-utero and in early childhood can be devastating, as in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism.

Low 25-hydroxyvitamin D is far from the only assault on these processes which increase the risk of autism. Fever, in the pregnant mother, the newborn or the child - including fever and other disturbances caused directly by vaccination - also raise the risk of autism. See the and the research cited at: popularrationalism.substack.com/p/three-years-later-after-ipak-alerted, petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/febrile-seizures-after-childhood and kirschsubstack.com/p/over-300-pages-of-evidence-from-the. For a clear, tragic, case of 18 or so childhood catch-up vaccinations in one day putting a healthy 5 year-old into ICU, from which he emerged with profound autism, see the interview of David Ihben, with his children by his side: marcellapiperterry.substack.com/p/isaac-ihben-5-year-old-boy-force.

Another under-appreciated risk of autism and related life-long neurodevelopmental problems is the mother using paracetamol AKA acetaminophen during pregnancy. This is one of the most commonly used non-prescription drugs - including Tylenol and numerous other preparations in the USA and Panadol and the like in Australia. Supermarket shelves are loaded with this common analgesics which, when used to excess, as it often is by the suicidal, causes permanent liver damage often leading to death https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=paracetamol+toxicity.

Paracetamol/acetaminophen causes temporary emotional dulling and potentially excessive risk taking in adults when used as directed: https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/15/7/725/5897711.

Flooding the fetus’ brain with a drug which interferes with neuronal signaling, when it its billions of neurons are finding their way, determining how to differentiate, or which axons and dendrites to extend or withdraw, will reduce the brain’s ability to construct itself as needed for the rest of the person’s life. Although the precise details are not yet known, it is reasonable to assume that some of the cell-types which are involved in underdeveloped - guiding the growth and connections of neurons - rely on 25-hydroxyvitamin D —> calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D) intracrine and paracrine signaling. These systems work, respectively, within a single cell, and to nearby cells, typically of different types. See: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/02-intracrine/.

Over-the-counter drugs containing paracetamol/acetaminophen should carry clear warnings against use in pregnancy - and I think any use by children and adolescents. See: Avella Garcia et al. 2016 Acetaminophen use in pregnancy and neurodevelopment: attention function and autism spectrum symptoms academic.oup.com/ije/article/45/6/1987/2617189 and the consensus statement by Bauer et al., 2021, Paracetamol use during pregnancy — a call for precautionary action www.nature.com/articles/s41574-021-00553-7.

Below are three research items of interest regarding the risks in pregnancy posed by low levels of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D:

1. Pre-term birth.

2. Pre-eclampsia

3. Pre-eclampsia increasing the risk mother’s risk, in mid-life, of young onset dementia.

I also suggest strategies to get women of childbearing age supplementing vitamin D3 properly.

Preeclampsia

The graph at the start of this article is from:

• Maternal Vitamin D Deficiency Increases the Risk of Preeclampsia
  Lisa M. Bodnar, Janet M. Catov, Hyagriv N. Simhan, Michael F. Holick, Robert W. Powers and James M. Roberts
  Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 92(9):3517–3522 2007-05-29
  academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/92/9/3517/2597795 (Paywalled.)
  
  The PDF is available from at Alexandra Elbakyan's awesome, life-saving, science-powering, website Sci-Hub: sci-hub.se/10.1210/jc.2007-0718.

The researchers surveyed women with no pre-existing medical conditions, who gave birth for the first time, from “outpatient clinics at Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, and affiliated private practices from 1997–2001”.

The graph depicts the risk of preeclampsia declining monotonically (without any break or reversal in the trend) with increasing 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. While there may be some confounding - such as inherently healthier women also happening to supplement more vitamin D3, and so have higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels - the trend is very strong.

The dotted lines represent upper and lower 95% confidence limits. The space between these encompasses the most likely range of possible true relationships between these two observations (preeclampsia or not and the mother’s 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, measured at 21 weeks gestation or earlier), which would actually exist, and so be found with greater certainty in a much larger survey, if there was a much larger population of such subjects than the number included in this survey. The uncertainty is inherent in the number of subjects sampled. The 95% limits indicate, that with a sample of this size, there is a 95% chance that the real position of the solid black curve for a much larger population lies within these boundaries. This is tortuous to explain in words alone. New Zealand math teacher Nicole Petty PhD has a most instructive video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=js09aLuFP4I.

I generally don’t fuss much about these confidence limits, but they are worth considering in this case. The decline in risk - as best we know from this data, the improvement in health outcomes - with 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels above 50 ng/mL is highly significant: a 12% risk of preeclampsia at 50 ng/mL seems to fall to 5% at 100 ng/mL.

If the solid black line truly represented the health improvement due solely to higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, then, all over the world, we could improve outcomes, exactly this much, by ensuring hundreds of millions of women, for their entire pregnancies or probably their whole lives to date, had 100 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, rather than 50 ng/mL or any lower level.

I am highly confident (for what its worth - I have no medical training or experience) that the great majority of the risk reduction depicted here between the lowest levels of 25-hydroxvitamin D - 25% risk at 6 ng/ML - and 12% at 50 ng/mL is real. There’s no way multiple cell types, including many of the immune system, can respond to their changing circumstances properly when they are starved for 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which needs to be present in their cytosols (cell interior fluids) and rapidly replenished as it is used, when their 25-hydroxyvitamin D —> calcitriol intracrine and paracrine signaling systems are activated. These systems will work fine with 50 ng/mL but will at best only work to a limited extent with 6 ng/mL.

It is uncommon to see measurements of health benefits improving so strongly - a halving in risk of serious complications in this case - in the 50 ng/mL to 100 ng/mL range of 25-hydroxyvitamin levels. I believe that there often are improvements, but probably not as dramatically as this. (I am 67 kg, supplement about 0.2 mg 8000 IU a day vitamin D3 on average and my 25-hydroxyvitamin D level was close to 100 ng/mL on the one occasion in the last decade or so on which it was measured.)

The 95% error margins open up at the left and right of the graph, since there are fewer women in the sample with these values. I guess that quite a lot of this downward trend of the solid black risk line, to the right of 50 ng/mL, is due to the inherently healthiest women (through good fortune, economic security and healthy lifestyle choices born of education and good advice) having a higher probability for supplementing the larger amounts of vitamin D3 which bring their 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels closer to 100 ng/mL.

So I guess that some, perhaps, most, but probably not all, of the halving of risk we see in the graph between 50 and 100 ng/mL is due to confounding. The likely actual benefits from these higher levels are probably not so dramatic, and I would still think that 80 to 100 ng/mL is a better level than 50 to 60 ng/mL.

Pre-term birth

The next pair of graphs is from:

• Maternal 25(OH)D concentrations  40 ng/mL associated with 60% lower preterm birth risk among general obstetrical patients at an urban medical center
  Sharon L. McDonnell, Keith A. Baggerly, Carole A. Baggerly, Jennifer L. Aliano, Christine B. French, Leo L. Baggerly, Myla D. Ebeling, Charles S. Rittenberg, Christopher G. Goodier, Julio F. Mateus Niño, Rebecca J. Wineland, Roger B. Newman, Bruce W. Hollis and Carol L. Wagner
  PLOS One 2017-07-24 doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180483

(Full-res: 5nn.info/temp/2017-McDonnell.png)

The subjects were women aged 18 to 45, who may have given birth before and who gave birth to a single child between September 2016 and October 2016 at the Medical University of South Carolina. Two of the authors, Professors Hollis and Wagner, are among the top dozen or so vitamin D researchers worldwide with awesome publication histories spanning decades of research.

The uptick in gestational length with 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels above 45 ng/mL, with its trombone horn of expanding statistical uncertainty, is a curiosity I discuss below.

The most important finding is that gestational age at birth declines precipitously the further the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D level is below 27 ng/mL (68 nmol/L = 1 part in 37,000,000 by mass).

While it is possible for women to give birth, after healthily long gestations (the upper left dot next to the “40”, with disastrously low 25-hydroxyvitamin D level), this rapid decline in the mean gestational length, with its narrow statistical uncertainty bars, shows that one or more bodily systems, in at least some women - surely more and more with the lower 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels - are failing seriously.

In electronic design, if some aspect of the system - especially a power supply voltage - was so frequently drifting towards the rocks like this, we would fix it by lunchtime.

In medicine, despite its numerous wonders (most of dentistry, a lot of acute medicine) next to nothing happens from decade to decade when simple nutritional inadequacies harm millions of people like this. (Don’t get me started on the reasons - it is a massive topic.)

From the article:

There were 15 million preterm births (PTB) (less than 37 weeks) worldwide and more than 1 million infant deaths from PTB complications in 2010. PTB rates ranged from 5% to 18% around the world and the rate in the United States was disproportionately high (12%) compared to other developed counties.

Substantial racial disparities in PTB rates have also been found in the United States: 18% among African Americans, 12% among Hispanics, and 11% among whites in 2009.

Since PTB is the leading cause of neonatal death and multiple short and long term health problems, it is critical to identify modifiable maternal risk factors that could significantly reduce PTB risk at the population level.

Results:

Among women with a live, singleton birth and at least one 25(OH)D test during pregnancy (N = 1,064), the overall PTB rate was 13%. The LOESS curve showed gestational age rising with increasing 25(OH)D.

Women with 25(OH)D greater than or equal to 40 ng/mL had a 62% lower risk of PTB compared to those with less than 20 ng/mL (p less than 0.0001).

The women with 40 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D had 38% the overall rate of pre-term birth than those with 20 ng/mL or less.

“(p less than 0.0001)” means that, given the sampling error in this particular study, the probability of the real relationship between pre-term birth and 25-hydroxyvitamin D being none (the two not being related at all), indicating that the particular subset of pregnancies included in the study happened, by chance, to be skewed in a way which made it appear there was such a strong relationship, is less than one in 10,000. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value. In other words, one would have to conduct over 10,000 trials of this nature, in a population of women in which there was genuinely no relationship between pre-term birth and 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, to, on average, for one of these trials to sample a particular subset of this much larger population of women, with this subset exhibiting as strong a relationship as was found in this study.

After adjusting for socioeconomic variables, this lower risk remained (OR = 0.41, p = 0.002).

After the researchers attempted to correct for confounding relationships they were able to identify, the lower risk of pre-term birth for women with 40 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D with respect to those with 20 ng/mL was 41%, which is not much different from the unadjusted rate of 38%.

The researchers were unable to attribute much of the very strong relationship they observed to confounding. This means it is reasonable to assume that the strong variation in pre-term birth rates was caused by the women’s 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.

Here I am going to be rather pedantic: The levels measured in this survey did not result from any supplementation intervention by the researchers. So, while pregnant women are encouraged to supplement vitamin D (albeit, often in quantities too small to attain 50 ng/mL after any amount of time, much less in a few months), the measured 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels would generally be strongly correlated with the levels the women had had for years before, perhaps for most or all of their lives.

So we are witnessing, in the stark results here, the impact not just of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels during pregnancy, but the longer term health impacts of the very low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels of some women, from previous years or decades with their immune systems and other bodily systems running from only a small fraction of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D level they need to be healthy.

These researchers would probably tell you that 40 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D is healthy and that less is not.

Governments and many doctors are happy with 20 ng/mL. (Some doctors aim for 30 ng/mL 75 nmol/L.) Yet we see the pre-term birth risk escalating the further the level falls below 27 ng/mL. Looking at the dots, I estimate that 40% of these women had levels of 27 ng/mL or less.

The authors do not comment on slight increase in gestational age with 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels above 45 ng/mL. Are these babes-about-to-be having such a fine time in the womb that they are in no hurry to progress to their next life stage? Are they busy composing their sonnets of the belly while they still have the full experience?

Is this just confounding: inherently healthier women being statistically more likely to supplement vitamin D3 properly, which is the most common way of attaining these levels? We can’t tell. The authors express no concern. There children’s brains will have built themselves in-utero with a perfectly good supply of 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

Preeclampsia and early-onset dementia

Young-onset (early onset) dementia is defined as that which occurs before the age of 65. Here we consider research which showed that women who had suffered preeclampsia in pregnancy have a very significantly greater risk of suffering early onset dementia. The articles and discussion are:

• jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abstract/2819207

Many studies have shown this disorder has consequences that last decades after pregnancy, with an increased risk of cardiovascular and kidney morbidity and mortality in individuals with a history of preeclampsia.

Recently, those with preeclampsia were described as having a 3-fold higher risk of late-onset vascular dementia after a mean follow-up of 20 years. This cohort study investigated whether preeclampsia and other hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDPs) were associated with an increased risk of young-onset dementia years after the pregnancy.

• jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abstract/2819208

For 2 centuries, clinicians have appreciated the worrisome consequences of high blood pressure and proteinuria [WP, protein in the urine, indicating kidney dysfunction] appearing during pregnancy. These symptoms herald the onset of preeclampsia, a major obstetric complication that not only causes serious morbidity but also threatens the lives of both the pregnant individual woman and the unborn child.

. . . data from the French Conception study, a nationwide prospective study in which 1,966,323 pregnancies were followed-up for a mean of 9 years. The team found that having had preeclampsia incurred a 2.65-fold increased risk of young-onset dementia compared with unaffected pregnancies. Furthermore, the hazard ratio increased to 4.15 (95% confidence interval, 1.30-13.14) if the preeclampsia occurred at a preterm gestation.

• journals.lww.com/jhypertension/abstract/2024/05001/pre_eclampsia_and_young_onset_dementia__time_to.860.aspx

This highlights a need for close follow-up among women who have experienced pre-eclampsia, covering neurological health as well as the metabolic, cardiovascular and renal systems.

None of these peer-reviewed articles mention the word “vitamin”.

These researchers seem to be unaware that low 25-hydroxyvitamin D is a serious risk factor for both preeclampsia and dementia. This alone would explain the correlation between incidences of the two conditions, since women with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D in pregnancy are likely to also have lower levels in later decades.

We can reasonably assume that the correlation will remain strong with the much more prevalent mainstream forms of dementia, occurring at ages 65 and beyond.

There’s surely more to this tragic - individually and for all friends and family, disastrous - raised incidence of dementia.

I have avoided mentioning what actually goes wrong in preeclampsia, since I figure some people read Nutrition Matters while having breakfast. This will do: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-eclampsia. (Ideally I would fix this statement, which is surely false regarding vitamin D at least: “Supplementation with antioxidants such as vitamin C, D and E has no effect on pre-eclampsia incidence.” However, it can take hours wrangling with those who busy themselves ensuring that Wikipedia pages conform to mainstream dogma, with no guarantee of success.)

The vascular and general organ damage which occurs in preeclampsia could easily alter the brain’s delicate circulatory system, including reducing, forever, its ability to adequately supply oxygen. This would probably entail damage to the lymphatic and glymphatic [WP] systems, permanently curtailing their ability to remove waste, and so contributing to the risk of the inflammatory processes which drive dementia.

The impact on the surviving child is not mentioned. What lasting harm do they suffer, which might have most effect when they reach their 60s and beyond?

Women’s health and survival are threatened in many ways when they become pregnant, give birth and their bodies sacrificing their own minerals and other nutrients in breast feeding.

Its a scandal, disaster and horror that so many women and their children face elevated risks of these damaging or deadly conditions for lack of a few tens of milligrams of vitamin D3 a year.

Priorities for proper vitamin D3 supplementation

If we are to focus attention on particular sub-groups of society in the hope of them adopting (freely, in full knowledge, without manipulation, mandates or undue influence) the vitamin D3 supplementation they need to be healthy, who should this be?

The elderly, in care homes, are one such group. They are helpless and often devoid of hope and personal connection. They are already in the care of highly organised institutions, who could easily dole out the daily capsules which would greatly improve their lives. But then they would remain, happier than before, in the homes for years more, and more such homes would need to be built. So this will be hard to get past the committees and stakeholders who control these things, not least because the results would show how derelict these institutions have been in caring for these unfortunate souls.

Prisoners are another group - again all in the care of institutions which could easily provide the daily or weekly capsules. This would probably be easier to get approved, especially if it could be shown that the result was less conflict and illness, which I am sure would be the case.

However those most urgently in need of proper vitamin D3 supplementation are the babes to be, with their bodies and brains building themselves from simple beginnings, in the wombs of their moms-to-be.

Women may have advanced two or more months into pregnancy by they time they realise they are carrying a developing child, or perhaps two or more. Ordinary vitamin D3 supplementation takes months to build up the 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, so it is already too late if we target women who know they are pregnant.

The proper target group to prioritise is women of childbearing age. Birth control doesn’t matter, since it is unreliable and women change their mind.

Women, especially teenagers, who are convinced they can’t get pregnant . . . These are most likely to become pregnant since they won’t use birth control.

So I vote for prioritising women of childbearing age.

Pitching this in terms of actual pregnancy and the long-term outcome for their children, would only impress a small, wonderful, subset of such women who are not yet mothers.

Unfortunately, many young women of childbearing age have other priorities. Some will smoke because they think it helps them loose weight. Many of them are borderline bonkers - look at their plastic fingernails. Bless them! Its a phase.

We need research articles focusing on the benefits for the skin and hair of proper vitamin D3 supplementation. Anna Piotrowska et al. 2016: Vitamin D in the skin physiology and pathology bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/1038837.pdf is heading in the right direction:

Unfortunately, UVB, which is required for vitamin D production, is also known as the main cause of a skin cancer, including melanoma. Here, we are going to review benefits of vitamin D and its analogues in the maintenance of epidermal barrier and its potential use in the treatment of common skin diseases.

We need a bunch of research studies on how proper vitamin D3 supplementation promotes clear, healthy, skin - with attractive, gutsy women and men to explain them on YouTube. [See Update 1, below.]

We need social media influencers and young women as annoying as this one. with 1.4M Likes: www.tiktok.com/@the444agency/video/7311839695346879776 (HOW TO COMMAND THE UNIVERSE TO GET WHAT YOU WANT), leaning into their cell-phone cameras, exhorting their viewers to avoid the worst of the UV rays AND to keep their skin, their hair - and their lively, fluid, brains - well nourished with at least fifty-nanograms-per-millilitre twenty-five-hydroxyvitamin D.

If they are supplementing vitamin D3 properly for a few months at least before they begin to bring their child into the world, everything will work out for the best.

Ideally, vitamin K2, omega 3 fatty acids, zinc, magnesium as well - but first and foremost, vitamin D3, according to body weight and obesity status:

vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-how-much

If you ever want to tell a friend about vitamin D supplementation and research, you can point them to, or look up on their cellphone:

5nn.info

or search for 5 Neglected Nutrients.

This links to NutritionMatters.Substack.com, my vitamin D pages and carries some preliminary notes on other nutrients. It also has a printable PDF vitamin D flyer with the graphs showing 50 ng/mL or more pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D squashing the risk of post-operative infections down to just 2.5%, from 25% at 18 ng/mL:

Update 1 - Research on vitamin D3 and skin health

Regarding research on vitamin D3 supplementation improving skin health, Henry Lahore - the retired Boeing electronic engineer who works long hours, most days,maintaining and extending vitamindwiki.com, and who is the co-author of multiple vitamin D research articles - has a Substack page on this subject: hlahore.substack.com/p/vitamin-d-the-only-nutrient-that.

He asked Perplexity AI, which provides references for its answers, “Does increasing Vitamin D decrease sagging skin?”. The references include: Bocheva et al. 2021: The Impact of Vitamin D on Skin Aging www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/16/9097; Danimayostu et al. 2023: Vitamin D3 and the Molecular Pathway of Skin Aging journal.ugm.ac.id/v3/IJP/article/view/4929; Janetovic and Slominski 2024: Promising Functions of Novel Vitamin D Derivatives as Cosmetics: A New Fountain of Youth in Skin Aging and Skin Protection www.mdpi.com/2079-9284/11/2/37; and Ambagaspitiya et al. 2024 Impact of vitamin D on ultraviolet-induced photoaging and skin diseases www.explorationpub.com/Journals/em/Article/1001225.

Its righteous and proper that many young women are obsessed with pink cellphones, their skin, hair, fingernails, clothes, love, boys→men→husband→home→babies - and have never heard of preeclampsia. The more who have 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D from an early age, the less likely they will ever need to know this word.

Dr Pierre Kory pierrekorymedicalmusings.com is an intensive care specialist in the USA. He pioneered the use of ultrasound in ICUs and emergency rooms. He is best known for his work with the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, of which he is now President and Chief Medical Officer: covid19criticalcare.com/about-the-flccc/our-physicians/.

I believe that every English speaking adult in the world should listen to this interview:

twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1768033041568727391

Except perhaps in the most remote locations, everyone in the world has - and still is - affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the disastrous mainstream response, at least in Western nations, which covers up the man-made origins of the virus and harms and kills tens to hundreds of millions of people through withholding proper treatments, while encouraging or mandating ineffective, unsafe, mRNA (Pfizer, Moderna) and adenovirus vector (Astrazeneca, J&J, Sputnik in Russia) quasi-vaccines.

This has profoundly reduced public trust in doctors and health authorities.

The same corrupt, inept forces which caused this also suppress proper understanding and use of nutrients such as vitamin D3 (which most of the articles here concern) but also numerous inexpensive, well-researched, effective, safe, treatments for COVID-19 and other diseases. c19early.org.

This corrupt and inept - and some argue persuasively, malicious - pattern of behaviour among the majorities of Western:

• Governments and their health authorities,

• Pharmaceutical companies,

• Academic journals,

• Doctors,

• Immunologists,

• Virologists and

• Vaccinologists,

blights human health to a profound degree.

Dr Kory is one of the heroes of the medical responses to this deadly corruption of medicine, science and health administration.

He discusses:

• The high level of excess deaths in many Western countries, since 2021, which follow a pattern consistent with many such deaths being caused by the mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 quasi-vaccines.

• This pattern of elevated death rates is highly statistically significant, and most affects young (under 60) white-collar, employed people. These people do not have high rates of death or disability from COVID-19 or other diseases.

• The life insurance industry recognising this, at least in the USA, but not yet acting decisively to determine the cause.

• Likewise a rise in the proportion of the population who cannot work and so must rely on disability benefits.

• The complete failure of the responsible authorities to investigate the causes of these excess deaths.

• The importance of early treatment for COVID-19, and how authorities have dismissed and ignored these in favour of expensive, profitable, treatments which are not as safe or effective as claimed.

• The need for population wide vitamin D3 supplementation, early in the pandemic.

• The corruption of academic publishing.

Please listen to the interview, in which Dr Kory refers to an article by long-time vitamin D researcher Bill Grant PhD (CV):

Vitamin D acceptance delayed by Big Pharma following the Disinformation Playbook
William B. Grant
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service 2018-10-01
orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v14n22.shtml

In this article five tactics are listed:

The same tactics:

are listed in:

The disinformation playbook: how industry manipulates the science-policy process—and how to restore scientific integrity
Genna Reed, Yogi Hendlin, Anita Desikan, Taryn MacKinney, Emily Berman and Gretchen Goldman
Journal of Public Health Policy 2021-11-22
link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41271-021-00318-6

Quotes from the interview regarding the importance of vitamin D and the suppression of this and of early treatments for COVID-19

For the search engine findable record, here are some quotes regarding vitamin D and the “disinformation playbook” which the pharmaceutical industry has long deployed to suppress its use.

Dr Kory had experienced the same pattern regarding the use of hydroxychloroquine, corticosteroids [WP - especially the anti-inflammatory drugs prednisone/prednisolone WP and dexamethasone WP] and then ivermectin [WP and pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/the-last-of-the-big-seven-fraudulent]. Bill Grant emailed him a link to the above article and Dr Kory recognised that the manipulation and lies had just observed with these early treatments had, for decades, been directed at vitamin D.

[27:48] PK: The main problem was that we [the mainstream Western medical response, including that of the government agencies] were not treating. We were literally saying “supportive care only”. This was the first year - fluids for hydration, nutrition, oxygen, Tynelol for fever [acetaminophen AKA paracetamol to reduce fever, which I think is generally unnecessary and likely to reduce the immune system’s response to infections: aminotheory.com/cv19/fever/] - that’s what is called “supportive care”.

TC: I could do that in my house.

PK: Like Paul [Marik], my partner, says: “There is no disease you cannot treat.”

There’s really simple stuff which we knew would help fortify immune systems and help protect against severe disease, that we thought were super-safe, that on a risk/benefit precautionary principle we should have, just as a rule, recommended.

Vitamin D for one. We should have had a vitamin D supplementation campaign, nationwide. This would have been very easy to do.

Now, as an aside, vitamin D has been one of the most attacked substances over the last three of four decades, by the pharmaceutical industry.

TC: Why?

PK: It threatens the disease model . . . We could do an hour on vitamin D, Tucker.

TC: Vitamin D like in milk? [Note: The USA is one of the few countries which fortify milk with vitamin D. The quantity is very small and they use vitamin D2, which is less effective than vitamin D3. See my arguments for putting all efforts into proper vitamin D3 supplementation, and none into food fortification: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#07-fortif.]

PK [28:55]: Yes. Vitamin D is a whole other discussion.

They are terrified of vitamin D.

Our normal . . . [He uses his thumb and index finger, separated vertically by an inch or so, and seems about to give a mini vitamin D pep-talk regarding the lousy 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels most people have, unless they supplement vitamin D3 properly. However, Tucker Carlson breaks in.]

TC: “If you find yourself terrified of vitamins, you are probably on the wrong side!”

PK: “There you go, I think you got it!”

I wrote a book called The War on Ivermectin. The genesis of that book is not only my expertise on ivermectin and my vast clinical experience, but . . . and I told the story before . . .

I got an email, during this journey, from a guy named William B. Grant - he’s a professor out in California.

He wrote me this email one day - my life was going totally sideways, because our protocols focused on ivermectin, its used a lot in my practice as it was by tens of thousands of doctors around the world, to really good benefit.

I was getting attacked. There were hit-jobs in the media.

He wrote me this email and he said: “Dear Dr Kory, What they are doing to ivermectin, they have been doing to vitamin D for decades.”

He included a link to an article called “The Disinformation Playbook”, and it’s got five tactics. These are the five tactics that all industries employ when science emerges that is inconvenient to their interests.

So I’m just going to give you an example. Ivermectin science was extremely inconvenient to the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

It threatened the vaccine campaign. It threatened vaccine-hesitancy, which was public enemy number one. We know that all the propaganda and censorship was literally going after something called “vaccine hesitancy”.

TC: I experienced vaccine-hesitancy myself.

PK: A terrible condition! Or life-saving!

TC: I am so grateful for it.

PK [30:40]: They deployed disinformation and I didn’t understand what was going on, Tucker, because when, for instance, I gave testimony in a Senate hearing for the first time in May 2020. Nothing to do with ivermectin.

I just said that it was critically important that corticosteroids be used in the hospital phase of the disease.

I was attacked widely for saying that, even by my own university. They did not want me talking to the press.

And that was based on the expert opinion of my group: Umberto Meduri was one of them, with several of the world experts in lung injuries and corticosteroids, myself and Paul [Marik] . . . and we were validated there, because two months later, a trial came out of Oxford, showing huge mortality reductions when you use corticosteroids. And now, it is the standard of care worldwide.

Six months later, I go back. Now I am an expert in an early treatment drug, which is ivermectin. I do the same testimony, that goes viral on a Fox News website, which was most watched.

It got up to nine million views - and it was taken down in the middle of the night.

[Tucker Carlson smiles at this instance of censorship by the network who fired him two or so years later.]

PK: And this is before the fraudulent trials which supposedly showed that it didn’t work.

So they had no data to show it didn’t work. All the data showed that it worked.

Now they changed that equation, using disinformation.

I couldn’t figure it out.

I gave that testimony and the Associated Press did a hit-job on me, in two days.

They sent the reporter. I buried her with all this data, all these trials, all these health ministries in South America and other places that were literally obliterating COVID . . . and she wrote an article about how its another drug to be debunked, like hydroxychloroquine.

She even wrote about some couple who drank a fish [tank] cleaner or something like that.

This was in an article interviewing me about ivermectin.

We actually filed an ethics complaint . . .

This was how naive I was, this was over two years ago.

We filed an ethics complaint to the Associated Press. We were so disturbed by this article.

We didn’t know that the fix was in.

But, the point of that story is, when he [Bill Grant] sent me the link to that article, I read it, and it was like . . . my mind exploded.

It suddenly saw the world differently, because every tactic that it described, I had a dozen examples of, in relation to ivermectin and even hydroxychloroquine.

And so I saw that myself and our organization were literally like the Bad News Bears [WP]

fighting a war against a global disinformation campaign, trying to destroy early effective treatment drugs, in order to prop up this vaccine campaign.

TC: Craziness!

PK: That’s my life.

TC: So what you are really saying is that the drug companies applied pressure to the medical establishment to withhold lifesaving treatment so that people would have no option but the vaccine?

[Pierre Kory goes on to describe the central role which the academic journals play in this thoroughly corrupted process, citing editors who quit their positions in protest about it in recent decades.]

This article does not directly concern nutrition. It focuses on the use of four repurposed drugs for treating COVID-19. These and other such drugs are systematically suppressed, at least regarding COVID-19 treatment, by the health authorities (and many doctors) in Western countries. These same authorities - and again a significant subset of doctors, together with academic journals and government efforts to restrict doctors work and public statements - also suppress the proper understanding and use of vitamin D3 and other nutrients to improve general health and to treat specific diseases.

Note 2024-03-19: I am not advocating the use of any of the drugs discussed below, starting with fluvoxamine, for treating COVID-19, except perhaps under medical supervision when a proper initial intervention involving calcifediol (or bolus vitamin D3), zinc, vitamin C, melatonin and ideally ivermectin has failed to bring about a clear recovery.

My interest in writing about this research is due to it showing (if the research is valid) that there are multiple inexpensive, well known, widely available drugs which are effective at treating COVID-19, beyond those just mentioned.   Health authorities in the West ignore or try to suppress the use of all these, just as they do with vitamin D in general - see the next article on Dr Pierre Kory's experiences: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/dr-pierre-kory-talks-with-tucker.

Anyone seriously interested in evaluating this research article and the use of fluvoxamine should read very widely.  Please see the comments below and follow Tim Lunden's link to Anthony Colpo's multiple critiques.  I also mention the strong warning the FLCCC doctors give regarding potential ill effects of fluvoxamine, including from a single dose.

[End of note.]

Fluvoxamine, AKA Luvox, (WP Wikipedia) is an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) which is widely used as an antidepressant drug. It has some molecular and functional similarities to the better known fluoxetine (WP Prozac).

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, some doctors noticed that hospitalised patients who were taking one or the other of these drugs suffered less severe COVID-19 symptoms than whose who took neither. (I don’t have the reference handy.) This may be due to the drugs’ anti-inflammatory effects.

Fluvoxamine has been the subject of a great deal of research: c19early.org/fmeta.html. However health authorities in Western countries have not approved it for use with COVID-19.

Steve Kirsch and other donors funded the first of the fluvoxamine RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials), starting in April 2020: www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/91994.

He wrote in May 2022 kirschsubstack.com/p/how-the-fda-justified-rejecting-an about the United States Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of an application for fluvoxamine to be approved for emergency use for COVID-19.

This rejection is part of a corrupt and/or egregiously mistaken pattern of rejecting inexpensive, safe, well-known, drugs (and vitamin D3, which is a nutrient) in favour of the mRNA (Pfizer, Moderna) and adenovirus vector (Astrazeneca, J&J) quasi-vaccines, monoclonal antibody treatments (WP which are exceedingly narrow in the viruses they target, and so become rapidly ineffective as the viruses mutate) and expensive, not very effective, not very safe, profitable antivirals: Paxlovid (WP ) and Molnupiravir (WP).

Today Steve Kirsch reported kirschsubstack.com/p/new-thailand-randomized-clinical on a newly published article:

Early treatment with fluvoxamine, bromhexine, cyproheptadine, and niclosamide to prevent clinical deterioration in patients with symptomatic COVID-19: a randomized clinical trial
Wannigama and 20 other authors
BMJ eClinicalMedicine 2024-03-14
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537024000968

(This article does not contain the word “vitamin”.)

This RCT, conducted in Thailand between October 2021 and June 2022, involved 995 people who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and who did not, at time of diagnosis, need to be admitted to hospital. There were randomly divided into five groups. The first group of 336 patients received “standard care”. I am not sure what this was, but they were all at home, so this presumably did not involve any drugs or nutrients. The other four groups received this plus drug treatment for 14 days:

• Fluvoxamine 100 mg/day, days 1, 2, 13 and 14, with 150 mg/day on days 3 to 12. (162 patients.)

• Fluvoxamine plus bromhexine (WP) 16 mg/day for 10 days. (172 patients.)

• Fluvoxamine plus cyproheptadine (WP) 12 mg/day for 14 days. (147 patients.)

• Niclosamide (WP) 2 grams/day for 14 days plus bromhexine 16 mg/day for 10 days. (172 patients.)

18% of patients were infected with the early Alpha B.1.1.7 variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, 26% with Delta B.1.617.2 and the remaining 56% with an early Omicron variant B.1.1.529. The Omicron variants were more transmissible and less virulent - less likely to cause severe symptoms. These displaced all earlier variants in early 2022 in most or all countries.

The results were stunning. The first chart, above, depicts the outcome on day 9: None of the treated patients needed hospital care, while 67% of the control group did, including 6.7% of these patients who needed intrusive mechanical ventilation (not just an oxygen mask) or ECMO (WP) - Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, in which the lungs are not functioning and the patient relies on their blood being taken out continually to be oxygenated and have its carbon dioxide removed, and then returned to their circulation.

Here are the charts for days 14 and 28:

(These charts are reformatted, with more helpful colours, from the article’s Fig 2. If you would like the three combined: 5nn.info/temp/Wannigama-recolourised-all-days.png.)

By day 28, nine patients in the fluvoxamine group required hospitalisation with low-flow supplemental oxygen. No other patients in the treatment groups required hospitalisation on any of these days 9, 14 or 28.

There was one severe adverse event in the treatment groups: a patient treated with fluvoxamine alone (0.6%). In the treatment group, 23 patients (6.8%) had serious adverse events. All these adverse events were: “loss of coordination with seizures/convulsions”. The percentage of patients in each group who had at least one non-serious adverse events were, 51.5% for the control group and 46.3%, 37.6% 29.3% and 27.3% in the four treatment groups.

These extremely positive results occurred without any attempt to measure or increase the typically very low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the general population of most countries. See: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/how-much-vitamin-d3-to-take and the research cited and discussed at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/.

The sections below contain some of the article’s description of the four drugs, with some text from their Wikipedia pages:

Fluvoxamine

A selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), is associated with benefit in the treatment of acute COVID-19 possibly by reducing damaging aspects of the inflammatory response to SARS-CoV-2 infection, lowering the risk of hypercoagulable state by reducing platelet serotonin levels, and/or other possible mechanisms. The initially hypothesized mechanism leading to clinical trials of fluvoxamine in COVID-19 was its anti-inflammatory action through activation of the sigma-1 (S1R) receptor [WP]. Fluvoxamine may also have antiviral effects through interaction with viral proteins and inhibition of acid sphingomyelinase.

Fluvoxamine, commonly sold under the brand names Luvox and Faverin, is an antidepressant of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI [WP]) class. It is primarily used to treat major depressive disorder and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), but is also used to treat anxiety disorders such as panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Fluvoxamine's side-effect profile is very similar to other SSRIs: constipation, gastrointestinal problems, headache, anxiety, irritation, sexual problems, dry mouth, sleep problems and a risk of suicide at the start of treatment by lifting the psychomotor inhibition, but these effects appear to be significantly weaker than with other SSRIs (except gastrointestinal side-effects).

Although the many drug-drug interactions of fluvoxamine can be problematic (and may temper enthusiasm for its prescribing, advocation and usage to some), its tolerance-profile itself is actually superior in some respects to other SSRIs (particularly with respect to cardiovascular complications), despite its age.

Bromhexine

Bromhexine hydrochloride acts as a mucolytic and immune modulator to help clear chest congestion, and as a TMPRSS2 protease [WP] blocker may be an effective antiviral against SARS-CoV-2.

Bromhexine is a mucolytic drug used in the treatment of respiratory disorders associated with viscid or excessive mucus. It was developed in the research laboratory of Boehringer Ingelheim in the late 1950s as an active ingredient for pharmaceutical use, patented in 1961, introduced in 1963 under the trademark of Bisolvon® and came into medical use in 1966.

Cyproheptadine

Cyproheptadine acts as an antagonist of 5-hydroxytryptamine (5HT AKA serotonin [WP]) receptor subtype two [WP]. It is an immune modulator to prevent potent effects of serotonin on lung vascular tone, respiratory rate, and systemic vascular beds, which may potentially affect COVID-19 clinical outcomes.

It is sold under the brand name Periactin among others, is a first-generation antihistamine with additional anticholinergic, antiserotonergic, and local anesthetic properties.

It was patented in 1959 and came into medical use in 1961. In 2021, it was the 280th most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 800,000 prescriptions.

Niclosamide

The anti-helminthic [helminths (WP) are intestinal worms] drug niclosamide may be able to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 viral replication and modulate inflammation by markedly blunting calcium oscillations [calcium ion signaling of individual cells - I was not familiar with this and would need to read a tutorial such as cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/12/1/a038802 to get up to speed] and membrane conductance in spike-expressing cells by suppressing the activity of TMEM16F [WP], a calcium-activated ion channel [WP], a scramblase [WP I had never heard of these either - they move phosphlipid molecules, which make up most of our cell lipid bilayer membranes [WP], between the inner and outer layers] responsible for the exposure of phosphatidylserine [WP] on the cell surface.

Niclosamide, sold under the brand name Niclosamide among others, is an antihelminthic medication used to treat tapeworm infestations, including diphyllobothriasis [WP tapeworms] , hymenolepiasis [WP tapeworms], and taeniasis [WP still more tapeworms]. It is not effective against other worms such as flukes [WP flatworms] or roundworms [WP nematodes]. It is taken by mouth.

Side effects include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and itchiness. It may be used during pregnancy. It works by blocking glucose uptake and oxidative phosphorylation by the worm.

Niclosamide was first synthesized in 1958. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. Niclosamide is not available for human use in the United States.

As noted in the previous article - about two videos, totaling 80 minutes, which give a good overview of decades of US government agency meddling with mass media and now social media, nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/decades-of-cia-military-censorship - censorship, corruption and bias in the mainstream media, and in social media, is a barrier to raising awareness of the importance of nutrition for proper health.

If you want to find reporting, analysis and discussion which is not constrained by government policy or the blinkered / avoidant output of mainstream media, here are a bunch of sites which will expose you to all sorts of contrary perspectives. There can be quite a lot of noise - and what I regard as utter crap - at these sites, but I find it worthwhile to peruse them, subscribe to them and/or get their daily emails.

Censorship, including the Twitter Files, weaponization of the judicial system and intelligence agencies

• public.substack.com

• racket.news Matt Taibbi and team.

• theintercept.com

• www.leefang.com

• jonathanturley.org

• aaronkheriaty.substack.com  Dr Kheriaty is a plaintif in the highly significant US social media censorship court case, Missouri vs. Biden.
  

COVID-19, health policy, medical freedom, critiques of COVID-19 quasi-vaccine safety and effictiveness, the World Health Organization, Bill Gates and World Economic Forum

• covid19criticalcare.com Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) - Drs Paul Marik, Pierre Kory, Joseph Varon and colleagues.

• brownstone.org

• usrtk.org United States Right to Know - Freedom of Information ninjas.

• trialsitenews.com

• pierrekorymedicalmusings.com

• eugyppius.com

• midwesterndoctor.com

• react19.org The most substantial site for information on injuries and deaths caused by the COVID-19 quasi-vaccines.

• nakedemperor.substack.com

• rwmalonemd.substack.com

• petermcculloughmd.substack.com  I find Dr McCullough's co-writer John Leake's work to be consistently interesting and well written.   He covers a wide range of topics.  For instance his link to an obscure but beautiful video presentation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr on grief.

• merylnass.substack.com W.H.O. Treaty threat.

• igor-chudov.com

• phillipaltman.substack.com Longtime Australian pharmaceutical industry consultant blows the whistle on the industry’s numerous failings.

• news.rebekahbarnett.com.au  West Australian Rebekah Barnett on censorship, medical freedom and the COVID-19 crisis.
  

SARS-CoV-2 origins

• usrtk.org/category/covid-19-origins/

• alexwasburne.substack.com

• jimhaslam.substack.com

• billricejr.substack.com  Researching possible early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in countries other than China, before the Wuhan outbreak.

• vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/  My no-longer up-to-date list of SARS-CoV-2 origins resources.
  

Politics, current affairs, critiques of wokisim, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion and whatever passes for the Left these days

• zerohedge.com

• unz.com

• vtforeignpolicy.com

• chrishedges.substack.com

• naomiwolf.substack.com

• normanfinkelstein.substack.com

Please mention other sites of interest in the comments.

Mike Benz, below, states that the United States 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 crisis were the most heavily censored events in human history.

The importance of governments - and rogue government agencies in cahoots with high wealth individuals, companies and academics who should know much better - meddling with freedom of speech, goes far beyond matters of nutrition and health.

While I generally prefer to read, rather than wade through long videos with low signal-to-noise ratios, I urge all y’all (my wife Tina is from Texas) to view two videos which are exceedingly pertinent to the (mis)direction of society, and the difficulties we face in trying to understand the world.

Former CIA agent John Stockwell interviewed for 60 Minutes in 1978 (15 minutes)

WWII and Korean War correspondent Clete Roberts interviews John R. Stockwell, author of books including In Search of Enemies.

Texan Marine John Stockwell joined the CIA in 1964 for all the right reasons - to support democracy. He was a paramilitary intelligence case officer in three wars: the Congo Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Angolan War of Independence.

He resigned in 1976 after concluding that the CIA’s activities - including overthrowing foreign governments and driving fake stories into mainstream media in many countries, including the USA - were harmful.

12:40:

. . . my own naivete, thinking I was well educated, when in fact I was not. I thought that in going into the CIA, that I was doing the best thing I possibly could with my life and the noblest ideals of our society.

Thinking I was bettering mankind, making the world free for democracy.

It just took me 13 years and three secret wars (and the Church Committee’s revelations) to realize how absolutely false that was.

. . . we are drifting from the values we teach ourselves in school, of democracy, of freedoms.

I think we are selling out to a very small police organization, who is absorbing [destroying] American principles about as fast as the judicial and legislative processes can absorb them - freedoms of speech and press - and at the same time are continuing policies of killing, in every corner of the world, right now in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

I discovered this earnest, heart-felt, interview while searching for “Operation Mockingbird” which Mike Benz (below) refers to. This was distinct from the JFK initiated wiretapping Project Mockingbird. Its existence, by that name, is disputed, but Mike Benz uses it to describe CIA and other military and intelligence agencies directly interfering with mass media within the United States. They routinely did this to the press (newspapers and magazines) in all other countries.

I found John Stockwell’s account a useful preliminary to Mike Benz’s interview:

Mike Benz interviewed by Tucker Carlson (65 minutes)

Mike Benz is described in this Judge Napolitano interview as “Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology at the US State Department from Fall 2020 through January 2021”.

This 2024-02-17 interview is presented, with permission, on Robert Malone’s Substack, with an AI-generated transcript:

rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/the-end-of-democracy-what-im-describing

It can also be viewed at Tucker Carlson’s Twitter (X) perch:

twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1758529993280205039

Hold on tight for a detailed quick-march through the decades leading to the 2014 transition from CIA et al. focusing their censorious, lying and otherwise destructive attentions on the mainstream media of all countries, to deploying their skills and resources also on monitoring and censoring social media, including especially the social media communications of United States citizens.

He ends with discussion of the new European Union (“a proxy for NATO”) law, which requires social media companies to install real-time censorship mechanisms to suppress anything which the EU deems to be “hate speech” or “misinformation”.

What I’m Describing is Military Rule.

. . . redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to the sanctity of democratic institutions . . .

I won’t attempt to summarize Mike Benz’s account. Here are some notes to help in understanding it.

A “cutout” of the CIA or any other government agency is a non-government organization (NGO) or some other ostensibly independent civil society organisation which is largely or entirely secretly funded and controlled by the government agency.

A “predicate” is a reason given by the CIA censorship-industrial complex which supposedly justifies whatever it is they want to do in terms which make it look both legal and desirable.

The 1948 document he cited, George F. Kennan’s “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” is at: digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/george-f-kennan-inauguration-organized-political-warfare-redacted-version .

The European Union’s Digital Services Act - requires social media companies to install real-time censorship mechanisms to suppress anything which EU bureaucrats deem to be “hate speech”, “misinformation” or a threat to “civil discourse”:

brownstone.org/articles/you-should-be-very-worried-about-the-digital-services-act/

Mike Benz on Twitter: twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber and at his organization: foundationforfreedomonline.com .

There is also a two-part interview with the Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek, totaling 85 minutes, which I have not yet viewed. It seems to cover similar ground to the Tucker Carlson interview, at a gentler pace, with more visual illustrations and without Mike Benz’s infuriating moving background:

twitter.com/JanJekielek/status/1759000134669435241

twitter.com/JanJekielek/status/1759213479817334819

Most of the focus in these censorship discussions is on overtly political communication. However, governments now routinely suppress or criminalize communications which they regard as at odds with public health policy. This might be not so bad if said policy was rigorously in alignment with protecting and supporting the public.

However, much of public health policy, especially concerning vaccines, pandemics and nutrition, is deadly, corrupted, groupthunk ineptitude - especially the de-registration of doctors who challenge harmful public policies, such as Australian doctor My Le Trihn: news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/refugee-gp-renegade-suspended-doctor

Dystopian Down Under

Refugee, GP, Renegade: Suspended doctor My Le Trinh

My Le Trinh arrived in Australia at the age of twelve, having escaped Cambodia after her mother was killed in a Khmer Rouge prison camp. Overcoming adversity, she made a successful life for herself here as a family doctor (GP). Then the medical regulators went after her…

Read more

a year ago · 93 likes · 37 comments · Rebekah Barnett

These are vast topics.

The next article will be a list of websites at which can be found a very wide variety of reports and discussions of matters the mainstream media suppresses, ignores or has no knowledge about, but which are nonetheless crucial to understanding what is going on. For instance, every country is a failed state, to some significant degree, because no government in te world is assiduously pursuing the truth about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

These average daily supplemental vitamin D3 intake quantities, as ratios of body weight, in kilograms:

• 70 to 90 IU / kg for those not suffering from obesity (BMI < 30).

• 100 to 130 IU / kg for obesity I & II (BMI 30 to 39).

• 140 to 180 IU / kg for obesity III (BMI > 39).

are the recommendation of New Jersey based Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa (CV).

[Please see the 2024-03-13 update at the end of this article.]

For 70 kg (154 lb) without obesity, this is 4900 to 6300 IU per day, on average.

“IU” is short for the grandly titled unit "International Unit”, which for vitamin D3 is a very small quantity - 1/40,000,000th of a gram. It is a great misfortune that the mass of an IU of vitamin D3 was set so low - to about the amount a baby rat needs each day to avoid developing the weak limb bones of rickets.

It can be difficult for some people to believe they need 5000 of anything each day to be healthy, especially in Australia and some other countries where the greatest capacity vitamin D3 tablets or capsules available without prescription (or after consulting a naturopath) is the still impressive sounding amount of 1000 IU (0.25 milligrams = 25 micrograms.

However, 5000 IU a day is a very small amount:

• 125 micrograms (mcg = millionths of a gram) per day.

• 0.125 milligrams (mg = thousandths of a gram) per day.

• One gram every 22 years. (Pharma grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram, ex-factory.)

The three ranges of ratios of body weight above are Prof. Wimalawansa’s slight simplification, presented in an FLCCC webinar in August 2023, of somewhat more complex recommendations in his July 2022 article in Nutrients:

Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19
Sunil J. Wimalawansa  Nutrients 2022-07-21 www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997.

The recommendations apply to people of all ages, body weights and body types, unless they have received medical advice to the contrary.

From babies to the elderly - whether underweight, normal weight or overweight - the first range of ratios applies. In different units, this is, on average, per day:

• 70 to 90 IU / kg.

• 32 to 41 IU / pound.

• 0.8 to 1.0 mcg (micrograms) / kg.

The green band in the graph above depicts this range of ratios.

Vitamin D3 cholecalciferol:

is made in the skin, by the action of high energy (per excited electron) short wavelength (~297 nanometre) ultraviolet B light, which breaks a bond between carbon atoms 9 and 10 in one of the rings of 7-dehydrocholesterol. This naturally occurs in the skin - though less so in old age - since it is one of the compounds in the chain of chemical reactions by which the body synthesizes cholesterol.

Our ancestors in Africa, 50,000 years and more ago, obtained almost all their vitamin D3 in this manner. However very few people today generate sufficient vitamin D3 to run their immune systems properly, for reasons including:

• This UV-B light is only available in substantial quantities from high-elevation, direct (no glass, sunscreen or clothing) sunlight on a cloud-free day. This is not available in winter, far from the equator, where billions of people live.

• There is almost no vitamin D3 in food, fortified or not. There is no such thing as a “vitamin D rich” food, which can supply a substantial fraction of the vitamin D3 we need for full immune system function.

• Most people in all countries today wear more clothing - and spend much more time in buildings and vehicles - than our African ancestors.

• People with dark or black skin and/or sun-avoidant lifestyles (for instance, many Muslim women) are at much greater risk of producing insufficient vitamin D3 themselves, especially when they live far from the equator. Those who live near the equator get much less direct sunshine in the monsoon months than they would need to produce adequate vitamin D, even if clothing, buildings, air pollution etc. were not further reducing their UV-B skin exposure.

• There are very good reasons for reducing UV-B skin exposure. The same range of UV-B wavelengths which create vitamin D3 also damages DNA and so increases the risk of skin cancer.

Fortunately, vitamin D3 tablets and capsules are inexpensive. Larger amounts can be taken every 7 to 10 days, so one 1.25 milligram (50,000 IU) capsule every week to ten days, provides what many adults need: 7000 to 5000 IUs a day, on average.

Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) is molecularly similar to vitamin D3, but is made by UV-B irradiating a chemical derived from yeast. It is not as effective at improving health as vitamin D3, which is the natural compound. (Jones et al. 2014 and Hicks 2022.) Although there are some more expensive non-animal sources of vitamin D3, the great majority of pharmaceutical vitamin D3 is made from 7-dehydrocholesterol derived from wool fat, in only a handful of factories worldwide, none of which are owned by major pharmaceutical companies.

Vitamin D3’s primary or sole role in the body is to be hydroxylated, mainly in the liver, to 25-hydroxyvitamin D (calcifediol, or “calcidiol”) which circulates in the bloodstream.

In people not suffering form obesity, only about 1/4 of ingested vitamin D3 goes into circulation as 25-hydroxyvitamin D. This is widely referred to as “vitamin D” but it is mistaken to do so. (Vieth 2004.) 25-hydroxyvitamin D is what is measured in “vitamin D” blood tests.

Government health agencies and many doctors regard a level (concentration) of 20 nanograms per millilitre (50 nanomoles per litre = 1 part in 50,000,000 by mass) as sufficient for good health. This is generally enough to supply the kidneys, so they can hydroxylate it to 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (calcitriol), which goes into the bloodstream at a very low level (less than 1 ng/mL). The kidneys carefully control this level of calcitriol, which functions as a long-distance, blood borne signaling molecule (a hormone) to control the behaviour of cells of several types in other parts of the body, which are involved in calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism.

All doctors understand these roles of the three compounds, of which only the third acts a hormone. While many doctors recognise that “vitamin D” (they tend to think of all three compounds as “vitamin D”) is important for the immune system, most do not understand that many types of immune cell require a good supply of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (calcifediol) in order to run their intracrine (inside an individual cell) and paracrine (to nearby cells) signaling systems.

These systems are unrelated to hormonal signaling. Since no peer-reviewed article (or any web page I could find) explains these in a tutorial fashion, I wrote such an explanation in detail vitamindstopscovid.info/02-intracrine/ and as part of my big page on vitamin D and the immune system: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds .

Contrary to what some doctors and researchers assume, the immune system does not use hormonal signaling and is not affected by the very low level of circulating 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (calcitriol). Many types of immune cells - and so the entire immune system - can only work properly if they have a sufficient supply of the second compound: 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

It is clear that 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin  D is needed for proper immune system function. A graph below, depicts rapidly rising risks of post-operative, bacterial, infections, the further below 50 ng/mL, the patient’s pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D level was. This is 2.5 times the level governments and many doctors regard as adequate for good health.

Professor Wimalawansa’s recommendations are intended to ensure that every person attains at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, after several months, without danger of toxicity from much higher levels, such as over 150 ng/mL.

This is the first - and, to my knowledge, only - peer reviewed vitamin D3 supplemental quantity recommendation which aims to attain this goal, which all people need to be maximise their health.

His recommendations goes further, by specifically coping with the the needs of people who suffer from obesity. In order to raise their 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels to at least 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) obesity sufferers must ingest, or produce in their skin, a greater quantity of vitamin D3 per kilogram body weight than those not so suffering, because their bodies convert significantly less than about 1/4 of the vitamin D3 into circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. This is thought to be due to less hydroxylation in the liver and to excess adipose (fatty) tissue absorbing more of both vitamin D3 and 25-hydroxyvitamin D: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#obesity-deficit .

Prof. Wimalawansa’s recommended ratios of body weight, for daily vitamin D3 intake, on average, per day, for those suffering from obesity I or II (BMI 30 to 39) are:

• 100 to 130 IU / kg.

• 46 to 59 IU / pound.

• 1.1 to 1.5 mcg (micrograms) / kg.

This range of ratios is depicted in grey as the upper band in the graph above, and the middle band in the graph below.

For those suffering from obesity III (BMI 40 and above, previously known as morbid obesity), Professor Wimalawansa’s recommended ratios are:

• 140 to 180 IU / kg.

• 64 to 82 IU / pound.

• 1.6 to 2.0 mcg (micrograms) / kg.

These are depicted as the top band in the graph above. Obesity is a challenging, debilitating and potentially deadly medical condition requiring medical attention. These recommendations come from one of the world’s leading vitamin D researchers, but are not intended to replace advise given by an examining medical doctor.

These ranges of ratios are indicative of good vitamin D3 supplemental quantities.

Those who get a lot of direct, high-elevation, sunlight, on ideally white skin, can probably attain the desired 50 ng/mL 25-hydroxyvitamin D level with somewhat less than the amounts recommended here. However, such people would probably be better off protecting their skin from such strong UV-B exposure, and obtaining the vitamin D3 they need from supplements, as recommended above.

The upper ratios are not strict. If your BMI changes from 29 to 30, there is no need to suddenly increase your vitamin D3 intake to the 100 to 130 IU/kg/day level.

If your obesity status, according to BMI or clinical judgment, is borderline obesity, 90 to 110 IU/kg/day would be good guidance.

Derivations of the ratios of body weight

These ratios were based on Prof. Wimalawansa’s clinical experience and his interpretation of research including Ekwaru et al. 2014 journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111265 and Afshar et al. 2020 www.jocms.org/index.php/jcms/article/view/822. See the Update 2024-03-13 section below for a graph and further discussion of the Ekwaru et al. research.

Afshar et al. found that over 500 of their opthalmology patients, when advised to supplement 70 to 100 IU/day/kg body weight vitamin D3, over many years, attained between 40 and 90 ng/mL (100 and 225 nmol/L) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. This is a very healthy outcome, with the only difficulty being that some people had less then the desired 50 ng/mL. Generally, these patients with the lowest levels would have been the ones who were suffering from obesity.

So this range of ratios was very good for non-obese patients, and a higher range of ratios for those suffering from obesity would enable these patients, as well, to attain at least the desired 50 ng/mL level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

Short of a massive trial involving thousands of people, for a year or more, taking a wide range of quantities of vitamin D3 a day, there is no exact way of determining what such higher ranges of ratios would suit those suffering from obesity. However, Ekwaru et al. and research cited therein provides sufficient guidance for Prof. Wimalawansa to recommend the two higher ranges of ratios mentioned above. See also: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#06-ratios .

These steady vitamin D3 intakes will take two or so months to raise 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels over 50 ng/mL, from typical, unsupplemented, winter (or any all year round, for those with dark skin, far from the equator) levels of 25 ng/mL or less. To raise levels faster (this is my suggestion - and I am an electronic technician and computer programmer), it would suffice to take about 4 times the recommended amount for two weeks. This two-months worth of vitamin D in two weeks will accelerate the rise in levels by a month or more.

In clinical emergencies, such as sepsis, COVID-19, Kawasaki disease, MIS-C etc. the patient (who almost certainly has very low 25-hydroxyvitamin D) needs their level boosted in hours, not weeks or months. As described in Prof. Wimalawansa’s article and vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#4.7, a single oral dose of 0.014 mg calcifediol, per kilogram body weight (obesity does not matter) will attain this potentially lifesaving outcome within 4 hours. For 70 kg, this is about 1 milligram - and it goes straight into circulation as the 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs.

Since calcifediol is usually not available except in Italy and Spain (see: vitamindstopscovid.info/04-calcifediol/), the next best approach is a single oral dose of about 10 mg (400,000 IU) vitamin D3, for a 70 kg person without obesity. This takes several days to attain at least 50 ng/mL, due to the need for hydroxylation in the liver. Prof. Wimalawansa’s article has recommendations along these lines.

Why 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) 25-hydroxyvitamin D or more?

Knowledgeable researchers and clinicians have been calling for 40 to 60 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D to be recognised as the minimum required for good health, since 2008: www.grassrootshealth.net/project/our-scientists/.

You can spend a day or two reading the research articles cited and discussed at vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ which indicate that 50 ng/mL or more is a good threshold of sufficiency. This includes research on COVID-19 and health problems such as pre-term birth, preeclamsia, schizophrenia, ADHD and autism and dementia.

The most direct evidence for proper immune system function requiring at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D is from doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital: Quraishi et al. 2014: jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/articlepdf/1782085/soi130062.pdf:

Over five years, 700 morbidly obese patients underwent the same abdominal surgery to help them lose weight - Roux-en-Y gastric bypass. The two, almost identical, lines in the graph above depict the patients’ risk of post-operative surgical site infections and general hospital-acquired infections, plotted against their pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D level on the horizontal axis.

The risks of these primarily bacterial infections was minimal (~2.5% for each type) as long as circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, before the operation - and so in the recovery period, since it is stable over a few weeks - was 50 ng/mL or more. With levels less than this, we see direct evidence of immune system failure: failure to control bacterial infections, which gets worse and worse the lower the patient’s 25-hydroxyvitamin D level.

25-hydroxyvitamin D is needed to supply immune cells internal signaling systems, which many type of immune cell rely upon for their ability to change their behaviour according to the conditions each such cell detects. Lower 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels cause these systems to fail, to a greater or lesser degree, causing the evident immune system dysfunction.

In general, this applies to all types of immune cells which use these signaling systems. The immune responses to cancer cells, fungi, parasites and viruses are mediated by similar types of immune cells as those which tackle bacterial infections. So it is reasonable to assume that all aspects of the immune system depend on a good supply of 25-hydroxyvitamin D in much the same way as its bacterial defenses do.

People suffering from obesity have generally lower than average 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, so those patients with levels above about 25 ng/mL (75 nmol/L) would have attained these levels primarily or solely due to substantial vitamin D3 supplementation. There may be modest confounding effect due to these people being generally healthier, independent of their higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, but most of the extraordinary degree of immune system weakness is surely caused directly by their low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.

Prof. Wimalawansa confirmed that there is no reason to believe that people suffering from obesity need higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels for full immune system function than do those not suffering from obesity. So, from this research alone (and it fits with a vast amount of other, less direct, evidence of this pattern of immune system dysfunction) we can reasonably conclude that 50 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D is required to meet the needs of the immune system.

Perhaps some individuals would have full-strength immune responses with 40 ng/ml, and a very few with 30 ng/mL. This would be very difficult to test, so we have no way of knowing who these people are. 50 ng/mL or more should therefore be the threshold of sufficiency for all people.

On this basis, we can conclude that no matter what other nutrients and supplements the person consumes, and no matter what medical treatments they are taking, they cannot attain their best possible health unless their immune system is working properly - and this can only be assured with at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

Potential problems with higher vitamin D3 intakes

High 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels can cause hypercalcemia. Calcium is drawn from the bone and the circulating (in the bloodstream) level of calcium, which should be very tightly controlled, rises to the point where calcification of arteries and heart valves can occur. This is potentially deadly, but, it typically takes 150 ng/mL or more 25-hydroxyvitamin D before such problems occur - and some people (at least with low calcium intake) can be healthy with twice this amount.

From the Endocrine Society’s Recommendations, Holick et al. 2011 academic.oup.com/jcem/article/96/7/1911/2833671:

Although it is not known what the safe upper value for 25(OH)D is for avoiding hypercalcemia, most studies in children and adults have suggested that the blood levels need to be above 150 ng/ml before there is any concern.

The body’s self limiting mechanisms make it very hard indeed to attain 150 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. There is almost (see Update 2024-03-13 below) no danger of raising levels so high when following Prof. Wimalawansa’s recommendations.

There are reports, not yet covered in the peer reviewed literature, of some people having heart palpitations when taking vitamin D3 supplements in quantities such as Prof. Wimalawansa recommends. See: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#adv . Any such ill effects indicate that the supplementation should be reduced or stopped. I will try to find out more about this apparently rare, and little researched, potential problem with vitamin D3 supplementation. I guess these people have an innate but usually hidden imbalance of some kind, which the vitamin D3 supplementation somehow alters to the point of being clearly noticeable.

Larger capacity vitamin D3 capsules

I am 68 kg (and 68 years old) and take a 50,000 IU vitamin D3 capsule once a week.

These: www.microingredients.com/products/vitamin-d3-plus-k2-mk-7 (240 caps for USD$30 plus shipping) are available with shipping to Australia, and I guess most other countries, via Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0C35N273V. I have been taking this amount for about 4 years, and only recently had my 25-hydroxyvitamin D level tested for the first time. It was 96 ng/mL (240 nmol/L). There are doctors, especially in the UK, who would need an anxiolytic even thinking about such levels, but other, more knowledgeable doctors would be perfectly happy with this outcome. I have never felt better.

[Added 2024-03-13.] Via various online retailers, Amazon, eBay etc. it is easy to find capsules with larger amounts of vitamin D3 than the 0.025 mg (1000 IU) capsules which are the largest which can be sold in retail stores in Australia. 0.125 mg (5000 IU), 0.25 mg (10,000IU) and 1.25 mg (50,000 IU) are the most common capacities. Here are some such products:

• Bio-Tech Pharmacal are based in Arkansas, USA. They financially support the work of at least two of the vitamin D researchers I loosely collaborate with. My wife and I used these 1.25 mg (50,000 IU) capsules for several years: www.biotechpharmacal.com/collections/best-sellers/products/d3-50-50-000-iu-1. We switched to the MicroIngredients capsules mentioned above when the Bio-Tech shopping cart did not work for Australian customers and no Australian eBay sellers carried these capsules.

• Simon Goddek PhD, with whom I wrote an article on vitamin D for Brownstone.org, has a comprehensive once-a-day (for average weight adults) vitamin D3 (0.115 mg 5000 IU) and vitamin K2 (200 micrograms MK-7) capsule, which contains several other important nutrients: sunfluencer.com/product/vitamin-d-supplement/.

• Life Extension make a once-a-day capsule with 0.125 (5000 IU) vitamin D3, vitamin K1, two types of vitamin K2 and 1 mg (1000 micrograms) of iodine: www.lifeextension.com/vitamins-supplements/item02040/vitamins-d-and-k-with-sea-iodine. “Life Extension” is a pretty fancy name for a non-profit organization, but I know a 95 year old who has been taking this amount of vitamin D3 for two decades or so, on the advice of an enlightened doctor. In recent years these are the small capsules she has been taking. She has no life-threatening health concerns and shows no trace of cognitive decline.

Vitamin K2

Vitamin K2 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_K2) supplementation, such as in the MK-7 form, is widely regarded as benefiting the immune system. There is also research which indicates that, with higher then normal 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels (the normal population levels are too low to be healthy), vitamin K2 MK-7 supplementation keeps calcium in the bone and reduces the risk of excessive blood calcium levels. There is a lot of research on vitamin K2. I will write about it when I have had time to properly survey the field. For now, please see: Maresz 2015, Gerry Schwalfenberg MD 2017 and Simon Goddek PhD, in the International Journal of Infectious Disease: Vitamin D3 and K2 and their potential contribution to reducing the COVID-19 mortality rate www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30624-X/.

I take a 200 microgram vitamin K2 MK-7 capsule, with 1000 IU vitamin D3, each day. (bioglan.com.au/bioglan-vitamin-k2-d3-60-capsules) My calcium level was fine before I started taking the K2.

With these capsules and my daily multivitamin, I now supplement an average of 8342 IUs (0.208 mg) vitamin D3 a day. This is 123 IU / day per kg body weight. I am not suggesting everyone do this, but I am happy for my 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels to be far greater than the low levels which greatly raise the risk of dementia and other health problems.

5nn.info has some details of other nutrients which I think are worth supplementing.

Addendum 2024-02-20: Here are two graphs which I refer to in my comment below, responding to Xavier’s comment concerning research which may indicate that there are worse cancer outcomes for some people with higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. It will be a while before I can read that research and respond properly.

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.740855

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43462-6

Update 2024-03-13

I added some links to higher capacity vitamin D3 capsules and to vitamin K2 research articles. I also added a note, above, that there is almost no risk that Prof. Wimalawansa’s recommendations would lead someone to attaining excessive 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Here is a more detailed discussion of this:

In very large populations, it is impossible to state with absolute certainty that there will be no ill-effects from any nutritional supplement.

I was recently included in an email discussion in which one of the world’s foremost vitamin D researchers mentioned that, in his long clinical and research career, he had encountered three vitamin D3 supplementing patients who had hypercalcemia, due to “markedly elevated” 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, which were caused by a deficiency in the 24-hydroxylase enzyme. (The discussion was prompted by a BBC report of an 89 year old man’s death which a coroner judged to be due to “vitamin D toxicity, hypercalcemia, and cardiac and kidney failure.” His 25-hydroxyvitamin D level was 153 ng/mL 380 nmol/L. Many people die before their mid-80s due, in part, to lack of this vital nutrient.)

The activity of this 24-hydroxylase enzyme is generally proportional to the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D level. It adds and oxygen-hydrogen OH hydroxyl group to the 24th carbon of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (and also to vitamin D3 and calcitriol), which causes these molecules to be rapidly degraded by other processes. This has evidently evolved as a self-limiting mechanism to reduce 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the event of very high production of vitamin D3 in the skin and/or the person (more generally, the mammal) eating rare foods which contain significant amounts of vitamin D3 and/or 25-hydroxyvitamin D. (The livers of some fish, especially cod, and of some mammals evidently contain these.)

Without this 24-hydroxylase enzyme self-limiting system, the level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D in any one person would rise roughly linearly with the quantity of supplemental vitamin D3. However, in the following graph, adapted from Ekwaru et al. 2014 The Importance of Body Weight for the Dose Response Relationship of Oral Vitamin D Supplementation and Serum 25-Hydroxyvitamin D in Healthy Volunteers journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111265 the lines depicting how increasing intakes (horizontal) lead to 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels (vertical) roll off at higher levels, rather than continuing linearly to the upper right.

This data is from thousands of people, with varying vitamin D3 supplementation and different, self-reported, body types.

If we plotted the levels of the few people who are partly or entirely deficient in the 24-hydroxylase enzyme, we would have reasonably straight lines, to much higher levels, for any given body type and average daily vitamin D3 supplemental intake quantity.

As far as I know, this deficiency - which leads to a significant risk of hypercalcemia for people who supplement otherwise healthy amounts of vitamin D3 - is quite rare. This email discussion was the first mention of it I had encountered in four years of reading lots of vitamin D research.

As far as I know, short of experimenting with vitamin D3 supplementation accompanied by one or more blood tests, there is no way of determining who has this deficiency.

As you can read in research such as that cited and discussed at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/, there are dozens to hundreds of reasons why everyone should attain at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. The risk of a significant 24-hydroxylase deficiency is minimal - I guess 1/100,000 to 1/1000,000.

For instance, Patrick J McCullough MD and colleagues reported in 2019: Daily oral dosing of vitamin D3 using 5000 TO 50,000 international units a day in long-term hospitalized patients: Insights from a seven year experience, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960076018306228 their clinical experience in an Ohio psychiatric hospital, in which some patients were long-term residents:

During this time, we have admitted over 4700 patients, the vast majority of whom agreed to supplementation with either 5000 or 10,000 IUs/day. Due to disease concerns, a few agreed to larger amounts, ranging from 20,000 to 50,000 IUs/day. There have been no cases of vitamin D3 induced hypercalcemia or any adverse events attributable to vitamin D3 supplementation in any patient. Three patients with psoriasis showed marked clinical improvement in their skin using 20,000 to 50,000 IUs/day.

However, those who took the 20,000 to 50,000 IU/day quantities to suppress auto-immune conditions (as Dr McCullough takes for his own psoriasis) were doing so under medical supervision.

Just as the risk of not going to the doctor, of not visiting friends and family, of not going to work or school, of not traveling for pleasure, is so much greater than the small, but no-zero, risk that we will be injured or killed in a car accident, I think we should generally accept the very small risk of a bad outcome from vitamin D3 supplementation, rather than not do it, or do it tentatively at first, with one or more blood tests and possibly medical supervision.

Except for infants breast-fed by 25-hydroxyvitamin D mothers, and for those who get much more UV-B skin exposure than is healthy, everyone, from birth to death, needs to take vitamin D3 supplements in order to attain the 50 ng/mL 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs to function properly.

Blood tests of any type are not available in many remote and poor parts of the world. If a person has a family history of hypercalcemia, they certainly should proceed carefully and use “vitamin D” (really 25-hydroxyvitamin D) blood tests, ideally with medical guidance, to supplement only enough to attain the desired 25-hydroxyvitamin D level.

Some people are keen to test their 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, and there are home finger-tip prick mail-in test services which enable this to be done without great expense and without involving the medical profession. I could have done this in the past five or so years, but I didn’t bother, since I was confident my 25-hydroxyvitamin D and calcium levels were fine. I recently did get them checked as part of my doctor’s due diligence and found the calcium level to be within the narrow, proper, limits and my 25-hydroxyvitamin D level to be about what I expected

I don’t argue that anyone else needs my close to 100 ng/mL (250 nmol/L) 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, except those who are following the Coimbra Protocol or similar to suppress auto-immune inflammatory disorders, including cluster headaches and migraine. More on this at: vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/ .

In the absence of medical advice to test 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, Prof. Wimalawansa does not advocate blood tests for most people. His recommendations, above, are sufficient to enable the great majority of people to safely attain the desired 25-hydroxyvitamin D level.

To recommend everyone supplement vitamin D3 only with one or more blood tests would discourage most people from supplementing it at all.

Prof. Wimalawansa’s higher ratios for those suffering from obesity are based on long experience and on the Ekwaru et al. research. In the graph above, the light green dot for those suffering from obesity, which I added, is further to the right than the dots for normal and overweight people than can be explained solely by the obese people’s extra body weight. This is part of the now widely recognised evidence that people suffering from obesity need to supplement vitamin D3 in quantities determined by a higher ratio of body weight than suffices for people not suffering from obesity.

I encourage Australians to write a submission. Word .doc/.docx or PDF files are acceptable, three pages maximum.

There are numerous failings of the federal government’s response which should be raised. My submission:

5nn.info/temp/C19-Response-Inquiry-submission-Robin-Whittle.pdf

concentrates on vitamin D - the need for at least 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L, using the units preferred by Australian doctors in “vitamin D” blood tests) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D in order for the immune system to work properly.

If you write a submission, please refer to vitamin D and the research cited and discussed at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ .

Here are some other failings of the federal government’s response which I think the inquiry should recognise and investigate. These failings continue to the present day.

1. The suppression or banning of all inexpensive early treatments for COVID-19 using widely available drugs or nutrients whose safety was well known due to years of research and clinical experience. The first widely known such early treatment was hydroxychloroquine: c19hcq.org/meta.html.
   
   The best known suppressed early treatment for COVID-19 is ivermectin: How could this medication be of no value when ten or so RCTs depicted by bigger boxes, in the https://c19ivm.org/meta.html section "67 ivermectin COVID-19 studies after exclusions: Early treatment" are strongly positive for ivermectin? The first RCT showing the effectiveness of ivermectin was published in October 2020: pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/the-timeline-of-major-battles-in-c8e. This growing body of research should have been recognised in early 2021 and ivermectin should then have been made widely available by the Australian and other governments.
   
   Instead, the Australian government has suppressed the use of ivermectin for COVID-19 and has supported the suspension of medical doctors for prescribing it for this purpose, including, as Rebekah Barnett reports, Dr My Le Trinh:

   Dystopian Down Under

   Refugee, GP, Renegade: Suspended doctor My Le Trinh

   My Le Trinh arrived in Australia at the age of twelve, having escaped Cambodia after her mother was killed in a Khmer Rouge prison camp. Overcoming adversity, she made a successful life for herself here as a family doctor (GP). Then the medical regulators went after her…

   Read more

   a year ago · 92 likes · 37 comments · Rebekah Barnett

   There are many other inexpensive, safe, effective, early treatments for COVID-19: c19early.org.
   
   The Australian government only supports and allows the use of a few early treatments which are all patented, expensive, highly profitable and of questionable value: Remdesivir is expensive and is associated with higher death rates after 60 days. Paxlovid only shows good results in Pfizer’s RCTs (Randomised Controlled Trials) - and has a long list of potentially dangerous drug interactions. Molnupiravir is not very ineffective and costs USD$712 per course. In early October 2021 the Morrison government ordered 300,000 courses of molnupiravir, 11 weeks before the United States FDA approved it for emergency use. The 2023-09-11 version of this widely referred to recommendation www.uptodate.com/contents/covid-19-management-of-adults-with-acute-illness-in-the-outpatient-setting, finds molnupiravir too ineffective to prescribe.
   
   Expensive, hospital-administered, monoclonal antibodies such as sotrovimab (why do they torture us with these names??) rapidly became obsolete as the virus mutated rapidly.

2. Excessive promotion of the mRNA and adenovirus vector so-called “vaccines” for COVID-19, despite them not being very effective and nowhere near well enough tested for general use. This is a huge topic.

3. Failure to protect individuals from state and federal (Department of Defense) mandates for these so-called vaccines, as a condition of employment.

4. Failure to properly hold the United States and Chinese governments accountable for their roles in the gain of function research which led to the creation of a synthetic virus which escaped confinement and became SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19: vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/.

Our governments failed - and continue to fail - in their responsibility to protect the public.

Not recognising the need for 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D for immune system health is the biggest single health policy failure of all governments to date, regarding COVID-19 and numerous other acute and chronic diseases.

To boost the level safely above 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) in 4 hours, for 70 kg body weight, a single oral dose of 1 milligram calcifediol, which is 25-hydroxyvitamin D, is the most important early COVID-19 treatment for the great majority of the population whose levels are half or less of what their immune system needs: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/calcifediol-to-boost-25-hydroxyvitamin . Bolus (large, single dose) vitamin D3, such as 10 mg 400,000 IU takes several days due to the need for hydroxylation in the liver. Healthy intakes of vitamin D3, such as 0.125 mg a day for 70 kg body weight without obesity take several months to raise the 25-hydroxyvitamin D level above 50 ng/ml (125 nmol/L) from typical unsupplemented levels of half to one tenth this.

All this can be easily understood by reading the pertinent research. I am one of many people who wrote to Australian healthcare administrators about vitamin D since mid-2020. No-one I know ever received a reply.

Please see Phillip Altman’s article:

Phillip Altman provides a nearly comprehensive list of egregious professional failings which, combined, give many people the impression that the COVID-19 injections, widely known as vaccines* are safe and effective.  Phillip is a PhD pharmacologist with decades of experience with clinical trials, as can be seen from this brief CV from 2007: announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20070712/pdf/313dvzb9wbdqkb.pdf:

Dr Altman is a well-known Australian authority on clinical trials and regulatory affairs with more than 30 years experience in clinical research and regulatory affairs. Dr Altman has worked in senior managerial positions for several multinational companies including Merrell-Dow, Hoechst, Roussel and GD Searle. He established his own company, Pharmaco Pty. Ltd., one of Australia’s first contract research organisations (CROs), where he served as a Senior Industry Consultant. His career has seen him involved in more than one hundred clinical trials (Phase I through IV). He has been personally responsible for the market approval of numerous new drugs and dosage forms since joining the pharmaceutical industry in 1974.

A graduate of Sydney University with an Honours degree in Pharmacy, Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy (pharmacology and pharmaceutical chemistry) degrees, he co-founded and is a Life Member of the largest professional body of pharmaceutical industry scientists involved in clinical research and regulatory affairs (Association of Regulatory and Clinical Scientists to the Australian Pharmaceutical Industry Ltd. - ARCS). ARCS presently has more than 2000 members.

First on his list of illusions is the assertion that SARS-CoV-2 originated via zoonotic transfer, from bats to an intermediate non-human animal which has yet to be identified.  Please see my previous two articles: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-sars-cov-2 and nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/61-of-american-adult-citizens-believe.

There are numerous lines of evidence pointing to SARS-CoV-2 having escaped from a lab where it was created by genetic engineering. Please see Alex Washburne’s Short history of SARS-CoV-2 alexwasburne.substack.com/p/a-short-history-of-sars-cov-2-origins and my page of links to thousands of pages of documents on this: vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/.

It is clear that most virologists are covering their collective posteriors by claiming that virologists had no role in the generation of this virus.  Once this is realised, and we see the pattern of the majorities of whole professions, worldwide, building a deceptive web of corrupt obfuscation on this foundational myth, it becomes obvious what peril humanity is in as long as this global pattern of corrupted groupthunk ineptitude continues.

However, I would add one item to this list, as number 1: To whatever limited degree the COVID-19 quasi-vaccines actually are safe and effective, this provides the public and individuals with a tiny fraction of the benefits of what would result from the much better researched, genuinely safe and effective, intervention of vitamin D3 supplementation to attain at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D which the immune system needs to function properly. 

Without such supplementation - such as 0.125 mg (5000 IU) vitamin D3 a day, for 70 kg 154 lb body weight - most people have only 1/10 to 1/2 of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D (the molecule pictured above) they need to mount full immune responses to cancer cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses. With 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels so far below 50 ng/mL (one part in 20,000,000 by mass) the majority of humans worldwide (not so much in equatorial areas with lots of ultraviolet B light all year round) are at high risk of the indiscriminate cell-destroying inflammatory immune responses which drive sepsis and which kill most people who die from COVID-19, influenza, ARDS and numerous auto-immune inflammatory disorders.  See vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/, brownstone.org/articles/vitamin-d-everything-you-need-to-know/ and most of the articles here at nutritionmatters.substack.com.

If most or all professionals in these fields were as principled, bright and energetic as Dr Altman - or, for instance, Brad Wenstrup M.D. (see his closing address www.c-span.org/video/?529219-1/hearing-origins-covid-19 2:57:10) - corrupt and clueless practices would be nipped in the bud, instead of spreading in pandemic fashion has they do today.

Modern medicine, including especially dentistry, routinely involves many excellent, sophisticated interventions which are truly miraculous.  However, the majority of medical professionals, immunologists, virologists, epidemiologists and vaccinologists are collectively blind to the importance of proper nutrition.  This is partly due to the corrupt influence of pharmaceutical companies, but it is also due to their own lack of interest in simple, unglamorous, approaches, which are not in tune with their priestly senses of self as practitioners of sophisticated, even heroic, interventions against complex and hard-to-assail threats to human health.  They dismiss mention of vitamin D like spam: How could something so simple be true?

It is easy for ordinary, bright, inquisitive people to understand that SARS-CoV-2 originated in laboratory experiments which were at least extremely reckless, even if they were not directly intended to produce the virus which emerged from them.

It is also very easy for such people to understand enough about the immune system’s need for 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L or more circulating 25 hydroxyvitamin D to realise that the mainstream medical profession’s ignorance of this is a disastrous oversight, and that it arises in large part from corruption and a terrible lack of interest in nutrition.

From these two items of knowledge, which can be acquired through reviewing the evidence linked to above, we can reliably conclude that in virology and medicine, the mainstream, majority, position is at odds with scientific principles and with what is needed to protect human health.

Then it can easily be seen that the rest of the interconnected set of illusions Phillip Altman lists are also utterly false and deadly. How majorities of whole professions come to believe things at odds with reality is a very large and perplexing topic.

* Quasi-vaccines, gene therapy and changing the definition of the word “vaccine”

* In Western and many other developed democratic nations, the most widely deployed COVID-19 so-called vaccines use mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) and adenovirus vector (AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) technologies to program our cells - ideally in the arm but in practice, anywhere in the body - to create replicas of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

These spike proteins appears on the outside of the cell for the purpose of giving our immune system target practice so it develops antibodies which can quickly bind to spike proteins on SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Such binding stops the spike from being able to enter a cell via the ACE2 receptor protein which protrudes from many of our cell types. It also binds some of these viruses together, since these antibodies have two binding sites. The most important function of this binding is that it identifies the object the antibody is bound to so that macrophages will destroy it.

The spike protein is toxic in itself, including when it breaks free and floats around the body in the bloodstream. Another problem is that the sudden increase in the level of these proteins gives the immune system a shock, which reduces its ability to fight infections (including COVID-19) and cancer, for some days or weeks afterwards. A third problem is that the antibodies attach to all the cells which were programmed by the quasi-vaccine, so marking them for destruction.

A real vaccine does not program our cells to produce proteins. Real vaccines are complex, potentially dangerous, interventions. They are usually non-infectious forms of the bacteria or virus which causes the disease in question. They may be versions of these which cause mild or no disease - and some vaccines are based on viruses replicate, generally safely.

The Novavax COVID-19 vaccine is a lipid nanoparticle which has replicas of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein attached to the outside of its plasma membrane. The immune system responds to these nanoparticles much as it would to a real virus - by developing antibodies which attach to the spike proteins and mark the entire particle for destruction. The Novavax injections are a true vaccine. This does not mean they are safe or effective, since they flood the body with completely unnatural lipid nanoparticles and toxic spike proteins. However, at least they don’t cause our cells to produce spike proteins and so be destroyed by our immune system.

For brevity, and so as not to seem vexatious, it is common to refer to mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 injections as “vaccines”. However, to do so is to fall into the trap of giving them the legitimacy their proponents wish them to have.

These treatments are gene therapies according to the European Union definition in Directive 2003/63/EC: eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A32003L0063. Although they are not intended to, and generally don’t, alter the genetic information in the cell’s DNA, they use genetic techniques to cause the cell to produce proteins. In the English PDF of the Directive, page 88 (PDF page 43):

. . . a prophylactic, diagnostic or therapeutic gene (i.e. a piece of nucleic acid), to human/animal cells and its subsequent expression in vivo.

The mRNA or the viral DNA in these two types of treatment are the nucleic acid. The definition includes treatments which alter the cell’s DNA, and also those which don’t. All that is required is that the genetic material is expressed, which means it causes changes within the cell, which in most cases means it causes ribosomes to produce protein according to the genetic.

The synthetic RNA material of an mRNA treatment is fortified against degradation and programs the cell’s ribosomes [Wikipedia: WP] - just as natural messenger RNA [WP] molecules do - to produce proteins [WP] by bonding together amino acids [WP] into a chain, in the order specified by codons in the mRNA. Each codon is a body of data encoded as three separate fields, each of which has four possible states, encoded, in RNA, by the presence of one of four nucleotides in each link of the RNA. This is the genetic code [WP] in which the 64 possible codons are mapped to a smaller number of amino acids and instructions to start and stop protein synthesis.

At the October 2021 World Health Summit, Stefan Oelrich, president of Bayer’s Pharmaceutical Division said:

. . . ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say: if we had surveyed two years ago in the public – “would you be willing to take a gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?” – we probably would have had a 95% refusal rate, . . .

As Zachary Steiber reported in late 2022: www.theepochtimes.com/article/emails-confirm-why-cdc-changed-definitions-of-vaccine-vaccinated-4590628, in early September 2021 the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed their definition of “vaccine”, in their Immunization: The Basics page www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm. From archive.org, here is a history of the first sentence of the definition of vaccine, leaving aside how it might be administered:

2011-05-22:

A product that produces immunity therefore protecting the body from the disease.

2014-10-10 to 2021-09-01:

A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.

From 2014-10-10 to the present day, this page defines immunity as:

Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.

From 2021-09-03 to the present, the definition of vaccine no longer includes immunity:

A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.

So President Biden’s initial entreaty to the American public, on 2021-07-21, with Don Lemon edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/07/22/part-1-entire-joe-biden-town-hall-july-21-vpx.cnn (transcript) was consistent with how the CDC later depicted vaccines, including those for COVID-19, because he emphasized their protection against serious illness, without stating that they would absolutely prevent infection. However, later, at 9:36, he stated clearly:

you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations

Whitehouse press secretary Jen Psaki agreed with CNN fact checkers that this statement was not entirely accurate. CNN reported that not only infections, but deaths had occurred in those who were vaccinated, with the CDC reporting 5,189 hospitalisations and 1063 deaths among such people with 26% and 28% of these, respectively, “reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.”

These mRNA and adenovirus vector treatments were strongly promoted as being vaccines - which had always been understood as providing immunity - when they neither operate like any other vaccine nor provide immunity.

Rather than admit these treatments were not vaccines, as did Stefan Oelrich - and numerous other people, then and now labeled as conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxers - the CDC weakened and so fundamentally changed their definition of vaccines.

Vaccines and vitamin D

There are vaccines which are genuinely effective and for which the risks are well understood and reasonably judged to be worth taking in all the circumstances, at least for particular individuals in particular circumstances. I am not sure exactly which vaccines these are, since I would need to evaluate the evidence for myself.

Vaccines are generally overrated by the public and medical professionals, due to excessive hope and faith in the somewhat magical ability of a single treatment to provide lasting protect against severe disease. Until recently, I assumed - as most people surely do - that influenza vaccines reduce the risk of serious illness. Then I discovered that the best research shows this is not the case, as I wrote in two articles. Few doctors know this research. They would if most doctors were sufficiently interested.

It is obvious that the COVID-19 “vaccines” are not as safe or effective as was initially claimed. They were supposed to induce herd immunity when 80% of the population received them, even though their ability to reduce the risk of infection and transmission was never tested. Dr Altman’s article mentions some of the numerous reasons why the mainstream experts - and so most of the public - greatly overestimate the safety and efficiency of these treatments.

Vaccines are intended to stimulate lasting immunity to a disease, before the person is exposed to the pathogens which cause the disease, by stimulating the immune system to produce antibodies [WP] which are customised at a molecular level to bind to specific 3 dimensional patterns of protein (epitopes [WP]) which are exposed on the surface of the pathogen itself.

Vaccination is an assault on the body which is intended to produce long-term benefits which are more important than the short-term ill effects. Assuming the vaccine is generally effective, this will be the case in proportion to how well - how strongly and specifically - the immune system responds to the assault.

So we can generally expect people whose 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are sufficient for proper immune system function (50 ng/mL or more) will generally derive greater benefit from vaccination than those with half or less this level. One of many articles which attest to this is Calder et al. 2021, Micronutrients to Support Vaccine Immunogenicity and Efficacy.

If doctors, vaccinologists, virologists and epidemiologists were doing their jobs properly, they would all be aware of this and the fact that without proper vitamin D3 supplementation or recent high level UV-B exposure of ideally white skin, most people have only half or less of the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune system needs. They would all know this if they were all interested. It it not hard to understand. It is evident that the are not very interested, since most of them do not known this at all. I have two recently published immunology textbooks, totaling 1500 densely detailed pages. Neither mentions vitamin D in their indexes.

The increased vaccine-induced immunity which results from adequate 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels is important, but not as important as the resultant overall improvement in immune response without vaccination.

There would be much less actual need for vaccines - to the extent that they do safely protect against infection and/or severity of the targeted disease - if everyone had at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

For each individual with such levels, the benefits are reduced risk of infection - and if infected, reduced of severe symptoms and death.

However, the benefits for the whole of society, as a greater proportion of people supplement vitamin D3 properly, so their immune systems work well, is not just saving these individuals from suffering, harm and death, but the great reduction in the number of people infected, no matter what their vitamin D or vaccination status is, due to less severe disease in those infected leading to reduced viral shedding and so a great reduction in transmission and the total number of people exposed to the disease.

The officially unacknowledged level of harm and death caused by COVID-19 “vaccines”

I have generally not discussed the safety problems with COVID-19 quasi-vaccines. This is a topic of crucial importance which is hidden from people who rely on most mainstream mass media sites for their understanding of the world. To them, vaccines in general, including those for COVID-19, are a crucial protection against disease, harm and death - so much so that they tend to think everyone should accept these vaccines as recommended by the authorities. Two good friends of mine since the late 1970s, now refuse to talk with me because I am critical of the COVID-19 “vaccination” program and because I raise awareness of the need for proper vitamin D supplementation as the best way to tackle COVID-19 and improve human health in general.

In late 2021 nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/omicron-rolling-updates I wrote about marching silently in Italy carrying photos of friends and family who had apparently been killed by these so-called vaccines.

I have 4,262 bookmarks which mention “vaccine”. 111 of them also mention “harm”, 84 “injured” 83 “injury” and 330 “death”. I bookmark new such items most days.

I can’t afford the time to produce a comprehensive account of why everyone should be concerned about this - not just for its obvious importance but because of what it means about the corruption and incompetence of the professional people, authorities and companies we should be able to trust regarding our health. Here are a few links which I think give us reason to question the currently very limited official acknowledgment of the harm caused by COVID-19 quasi-vaccines. There’s no particular order. I could probably make a list 50 times as long with proper notes if I spent a week so on it, and if I included research into excess deaths.

• A large organization offering support for long-term COVID-19 vaccine effects:

  react19.org. 11 video diaries and 1207 written stories.

• Jessica Lombardo Has Reached Out and Helped Over 60 Vaccine Injured Victims to Date

• Trialsite News - a highly professional discussion site for medical news and issues: COVID-19 Vaccine Injured: Left Alone, in Often, Dire Declining Health, Mounting Debt & Absolutely No Help from Government

• Epoch Times, who have done a lot of great reporting on the failings of the COVID-19 pandemic response: Vaccine-Injured Need Support as Number of Suicides Climb: Brianne Dressen

• 82 minute video of reports of COVID-19 vaccine injury. I have only watched a few minutes. It is too distressing: www.anecdotalsmovie.com

• Support group for 1100 UK residents injured by COVID-19 vaccination:

  www.ukcvfamily.org

1. the majority of virologists are working responsibly to protect humanity or whether:

2. they are, perhaps unwittingly - and contrary to the position of a minority of their colleagues - working in ways which harm and kill millions of people.

The latter must be the case if the virus really did escape from a lab, where it was likely generated by deliberate genetic engineering techniques. In that case, the majority of virologists are deluded, untrustworthy and a clear and present danger to humanity - so they must be prevented from continuing the gain of function research which lead to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most virologists are not arguing strongly, in public, against the left-leaning, government-agreed, mainstream media supported insistence that the SARS-CoV-2 arose from zoonotic transfer - originating in bats, replicating an intermediate non-human host animal, mutating there into a form which can infect and replicate in humans, and then crossing over to humans.

The majority are arguing for - or not challenging the mainstream position that it was - zoonotic transfer and therefore that wide-ranging virological research should continue at an expanded rate to find out more about zoonotic transfer, in an attempt to prevent such things from happening again, and to prepare for vaccines, drugs and monoclonal antibodies to protect against such pathogens.

My previous Substack article nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-sars-cov-2 discussed this in detail. Likewise Alex Washburne’s recent alexwasburne.substack.com/p/a-short-history-of-sars-cov-2-origins.

Because of the relentless portrayal, in the mass media and government statements, of the lab release hypothesis as misinformation and “conspiracy theories”, I assumed that most people believed this position. After all, it is the majority of virologists who are stating or supporting the zoonotic transfer hypothesis.

I was surprised and delighted to read that a new survey indicates, very clearly, that most Americans believe - correctly, I am sure - that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the lab.

In: today.yougov.com/topics/politics/explore/topic/The_Economist_YouGov_polls?content=surveys is an item named "Economist Tables July 24 2023" which consists of a link to this PDF:

docs.cdn.yougov.com/pvpz4fi6ym/econTabReport.pdf

On page 94 is a table of results arising from a question 54, asked of 1500 U.S. adult citizens between 22 and 25 July 2023:

Regardless of whether or not the virus responsible for COVID-19 was created or naturally mutated, do you believe it is true or false that a laboratory in China was the origin of the virus?

The lab leak hypothesis is usually thought to equate to the virus having been engineered either in that lab or perhaps in another lab from the one it escaped.

• 31% of respondents believe that the lab release hypothesis is definitely true.

• 29% of respondents believe that the lab release hypothesis is probably true.

This 61% totally outnumbers the 25% who were not sure and the remaining 15%:

• 5% of respondents believe that the lab release hypothesis is definitely false - and that therefore SARS-CoV-2 definitely arose from zoonotic transfer.

• 10% of respondents believe that the lab release hypothesis is probably false.

The trends are also clear: Those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, who are registered as Democrats, whose political ideology is liberal, and who are under the age of 30, are significantly more likely to believe in the zoonotic transfer hypothesis.

This is excellent news. The corrupt and egregious campaign by an influential subset of virologists, apparently with the support of the majority of their profession, has failed to convince the majority of the population that these virologists are doing good work, should do more of it and are in no way responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic or for covering up the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Since I wrote my previous article, I have updated the companion web page, which contains links to the most important articles and other documents:

vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins

The new items are in a section vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/#2023-08-04:

• Discussion of the poll mentioned above: vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/#yougov.

• Links to and discussion of a series of articles which appeared in The Weekend Australian (a Murdoch Press national broadsheet newspaper) by Sharri Markson. These excellent articles have brought the truth about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and the Proximal Origin article cover-up, to the attention of perhaps a million Australians.

• U.S. Senator Rand Paul has written a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding Tony Fauci lying under oath to Congress, with his testimony that his National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) had not funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

• Alabama virologist Dr Jeanne Marazzo has taken Tony Fauci’s position as NIAID Director. In April 2020 she explained (Twitter video) the zoonotic transfer hypothesis to children as if it were true, so she probably still believes it.

• There is a PDF of a report by two U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency analysts which is strongly critical of the zoonotic transfer hypothesis, and so of the Proximal Origin article. I made a version of this file with a searchable and copy-and-pasteable text layer, which the original version lacked: vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/an-argument-against-natural-covid-19-creation-copy-2-OCRed.pdf.

• Links to part of the DRASTIC website which lists articles of interest regarding SARS-CoV-2 origins, including some which indicate that the purported zoonotic transfer from the RaTG13 bat virus did not occur, since the history of this genome is not as natural as the proponents of that hypothesis assume it is.

• Links to further articles along the above lines.

I will keep updating this page vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins as new material becomes available. Please suggest web pages, preprints and peer-reviewed articles I should add to it.

While the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is beyond the nutritional focus of this Substack, good nutrition (sufficient vitamin D3 supplementation to attain 50 ng 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, as needed by the immune system) would have strongly suppressed its pandemic transmission and greatly reduce the rate of harm and death for the smaller number of people who were infected.

The same corrupt, inept, groupthunk patterns of professional (mis)conduct which ignore, deride and/or suppress attempts to raise awareness of the need for better nutrition are also pushing the zoonotic transfer hypothesis. In so doing, these virologists, immunologists and other professional people are facilitating the coverup orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party AND increasing the risks of virologists causing another pandemic due to one or more of their gain of function driven viral strains escaping confinement, most likely by infecting a lab worker via a punctured glove or inhalation of an aerosol.

Please see my new page vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/ which links to the most significant documents and articles concerning:

• The origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

• The fraudulent authorship and corrupted background of the highly influential March 2020 article in Nature Medicine which rules out a lab leak as the source of SARS-CoV-2 and concludes that it most likely arose from zoonotic transfer from bats via an intermediate species at the Wuhan Seafood Market (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Market):
  
  The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
  Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes and Robert F. Garry
  Nature Medicine 2020-03-17  (26, pages 450–452 (2020))
  www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

The photo above is of ~2500 pages of material about these matters which I have only partly read, all drawn from the items linked to at: vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/.

The bottom left stack of A4 sheets is the 300 page April 2023 report on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, prepared by the Republican minority of the Subcommittee on Primary Health & Retirement, one of the subcommittees of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. This is by far the most comprehensive publicly available report on this subject.

Above it are a variety of academic journal articles and others from sites including Brownstone.org, The Intercept and U.S. Right to Know. At the top right are more such articles, including a bunch written since October 2022 by Alex Washburne, only some of which I have read and all of which, I am sure, are highly pertinent to the question at hand.

For a quick overview of the history of gain of function (GoF) research, SARS-CoV-2 and the Proximal Origin article, I recommend his recent article alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-lab-origin-of-sars:

The hypotheses which might explain the origins of SARS-CoV-2

There is no reason to believe that the three viruses:

• SARS-CoV-1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS in 2002 (when it was known as “SARS” for “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”),

• MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MERS in 2012, or

• SARS-CoV-2 (SARS CoronaVirus 2) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2 in 2019

jumped directly from bats to humans. All three are within the betacoronavirus en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacoronavirus genus, with MERS being within the merbecovirus sub-genus and the other two within the sarbecovirus sub-genus. Bats are the natural reservoir for most types betacoranavirus, including these two sub-genera.

Viruses of these sub-genera can infect mammals other than bats, and it is well established that both SARS-CoV-1 and MERS infected humans via a zoonotic transfer route, in which the progenitor viruses jumped from bats to intermediate non-human host animals. The virus was then transmitted between these animals and virus evolved further to the point where it could both infect and be transmitted between humans.

After the detection of human infections, it took 11 months for a peer reviewed article to be published identifying the SARS-CoV-1 intermediate host as Himalayan palm civets - and 15 months for such an article to be published showing camels were the intermediate host for MERS.

To date - July 2023, 44 months after COVID-19 cases were first identified - no intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 has been identified. The Chinese Communist Party government has covered up its handling of the early stages of the pandemic and the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WiV). It alleges, without evidence, that the virus was imported into China in frozen food from the USA. However, if the CCP did find evidence of zoonotic transfer in Chinese mammals, it would be to its advantage in many ways to make this public. This would be consistent with the CCP’s urgent moves to close the market and sample it for signs of SARS-CoV-2. Solid evidence of zoonotic transfer would disprove the most damaging hypothesis for the reputation of the CCP and for all of China: that the virus was generated in a Chinese laboratory.

Here is an exhaustive list of possible explanations for the origin of the first one or more strains of SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans:

1. Zoonotic transfer via a currently unidentified non-human animal species. This is most likely to have have occurred in the wild, including in farms and urban markets. However, it could, in principle, have occurred if a virus which naturally evolved in an intermediate species was being studied in a lab and the jump to humans occurred in the lab, such as by accidental release or by it infecting one or more lab workers.

2. The virus being previously unknown, jumping from a bat to a human. Such bats are too far away from Wuhan for this to have occurred, but bat and bat viruses were studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WiV). This direct path is regarded as impossible since SARS-CoV-2 differs too much from all known bat viruses, in ways which are highly adapted to humans - and there is no known reason for such features to evolve in bats.

3. The virus was created in the lab by serial passaging, and then infected humans inside and/or outside the lab. Serial passage is a common technique by which laboratory workers infect a set of animals or animal cells in a tissue culture with an initial, presumably naturally occurring, bat or intermediate animal virus and then select some viruses from the infected cells to repeat the process in the next of a potentially large number of such cycles.
   
   Serial passaging is a form of accelerated, human-directed evolution, with the conditions accidentally and/or deliberately creating selection pressures which favour the survival and replication of viruses with mutations which alter their behaviour. The conditions may increase the rate of mutations above that found in Nature. This is easy to perform and can generate a variety of strains of the original viruses with generally small, incremental, alterations to the genome - and occasionally with large changes.
   
   The question of whether a bat virus could acquire a furin cleavage site (which enables the human furin enzyme to break the spike protein in two as part of its actions to enter a cell, in a way which facilitate this entry) via serial passaging arose during the writing of Proximal Origin and in the recent congressional hearing (below). While this is not impossible, it is generally thought to be extremely unlikely.
   
   Serial passaging is gain of function (GoF) research, in that it may - by accident or design - lead to the generation of novel viral genomes which causes the virus to be more transmissible and/or more virulent (stronger symptoms) than the initial virus. At least one Proximal Origin author - Kristian Andersen - did not consider this to be “engineering”. However, I believe it is reasonable to consider this kind of research as engineering - even though it is not as specific or directed as the approaches discussed next, which are always regarded as genetic engineering.

4. There are a variety of techniques, including “chimeric” approaches, which I lack the expertise to describe in detail.
   
   The production of a chimera of two related virus strains involves breaking the genomes (as RNA) into half a dozen or so pieces, at particular points, and then taking segments from both viruses and reassembling them to form a new genome with one or more segments from one virus and the rest from the other. Some or all of this work may process the genetic information encoded in DNA, rather than the normal RNA contained in the virus, because DNA is more stable and easier to work with and alter.
   
   For instance, it is possible to replace the spike protein gene from one virus with the spike protein gene from another virus. Chimeric genomes typically contain patterns resulting from the restriction sites, where the DNA version of the genome was cut by specific bacterial enzymes. Such patterns have been found in SARS-CoV-2, according to this preprint, co-authored by Alex Washburne, which is currently undergoing peer review prior to publication:
   

   Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen, bioRxiv preprint 2023-04-11
   www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v2.
   
   It is also possible to introduce specifically crafted sequences of nucleotides into the finally assembled genome, where these sequences nave a maximum practical length of 100 to 200 nucleotides en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide, also known as base pairs en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair. It takes three base pairs, each with one of the four combinations of the four different nucleotides, to form a codon - of which there are 64 possible combinations. Each codon can specify a single amino acid to be built into the gene’s final protein. These DNA oligos are made to order and are too short to build a complete viral genome, of 30,000 or so base pairs, except with extreme effort and expense, since the error rate of these short pieces of DNA rises according to their length. However, it is relatively easy to use short synthetic pieces of DNA to insert specific new sections into the final genome, such as to build a protein with a specific sequence of amino acids which furin binds to, and so cleaves the protein.
   
   This only requires 12 base pairs: CCT CGG CGG GCA, which is one way of encoding the amino acids Proline Arginine Arginine Analine, which form the furin cleavage site. The CGG CGG pattern is highly unusual and suggests that these 4 codons were inserted by genetic engineers. I will write more about this once I have figured out the state of the debate about this.
   
   Such work may be referred to as a reverse genetic system www.nature.com/articles/s41596-021-00491-8 in which the RNA viral genome is copied into DNA, which is then manipulated. The resulting DNA is transcribed back into RNA, which is forced into a susceptible cell where it programs the cell to generate whole, infectious, viruses with the new genetic design.
   
   Modifications to a previously established “backbone” genome (see MA15 in the slides below) can be made with relative ease, such as by introducing one or more genes from a similar virus in place of the matching gene(s) in the backbone genome.

It is well known that the WiV was using serial passaging and other techniques to research bat coronaviruses. They may have been doing this for their own reasons, but they certainly had been doing this as part of United States funded research, channeled through the EcoHealth Alliance, using techniques developed by, and transferred to the WiV by, the acknowledged world leader of coronarvirus genetic engineering, Professor Ralph Baric.

The banal evil of Gain of Function virology

Here is a video of Ralph Baric, on 2018-04-06, at his University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describing an experiment in which he and his colleagues infected mice, which had been genetically engineered to express human ACE2 receptors, with several novel viruses which they deliberately engineered. This is described, at least in part in SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence, Meachery et al. PNAS 2016-03-14: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1517719113.

The generation of these mice should raise significant concerns. If such mice escaped the lab, or were spirited away as pets, then populations of such mice might develop and so provide an ideal population of zoonotic transfer intermediate host animals for the evolution of bat or other viruses into strains which would infect humans.

At 11:52 he is discussing six viruses, all but the first of which were chimerically engineered by inserting the spike protein gene from one of six bat coronavirus in place of the spike gene from five preexisting viruses. Viruses 3 and 4, which contained the spike genes from WIV1 and SHC014 bat viruses, were moderately virulent in normal mice, but were lethal (underlined, below) in the humanized mice.

He is describing novel viruses, deliberately engineered using chimeric techniques, to more rapidly gain entry to (and so to infect) cells with human ACE2 receptors than they gain entry to cells with mouse or bat ACE2 receptors. (The exact molecular structure of the ACE2 receptor en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiotensin-converting_enzyme_2 varies from one species to the next, and can vary somewhat within a single species.)

This would likely make the new chimeric viruses more transmissible and/or virulent in humans than the original SARS-like backbone virus they started with: MA15, which had been engineered to better infect mice.

If these viruses escaped confinement they could have started a new pandemic. They would not necessarily have been as transmissible and virulent as SARS-CoV-2, which has a spike proteins with a furin cleavage site and changes to the receptor binding domain (the part which closely matches and binds to the target cell’s ACE2 receptor). Both such changes are crucial to SARS-CoV-2’s transmisibility and virulence in humans.

If this had been part of a commercially produced horror movie, the score would have been increasingly menacing to this point and would have darkened and convulsed with portent as he pointed to the slide, below:

and uttered these words in bold:

If the parental strain is virulent and you drop these bat [bat coronavirus spike protein] genes in, [here is is referring to wild-type experimental mice as hosts, with the original virus perhaps having been deliberately fine-tuned to infect such mice] they attenuate virulence - that's good news.

But if you take a mouse which has a human [ACE2] receptor in it . . . 

Here is is referring to the "Transgenic hACE2 Gene" column where it intersects with the columns for the WIV1 and SHC014 bat virus spike protein genes, where the two cells are "Lethal".

" . . . these viruses are lethal.

Ralph Baric is the world’s foremost expert in coronavirus genetic engineering. Please do play the video to 11:53.

This is a horror video.

He clearly described GoF research which could have started a pandemic in humans and killed millions of people.

His tone of voice was entirely routine.

This exemplifies the principle that evil can be banal.

It was a crime against humanity to perform the genetic engineering which resulted in the presumably accidental escape of SARS-CoV-2. It certainly was made in a lab, probably in Wuhan, on the basis of American information, training and prior funding. There is no direct evidence for it arising from zoonotic transfer.

The United Nations definition of a crime against humanity does not require that there be any specific intent: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/the-covid-19-pandemic-response-killed.

I want to give some background to the the abovementioned experiments, since I argue that the researchers committed a heinous crime. In this instance the chimeric viruses have not caused human disease, as far as we know, but they might have if they had escaped confinement. Beyond that, the acceptance of such research, and the knowledge and confidence gained from this specific research, likely emboldened these and other researchers to conduct further such GoF experiments, possibly including the researchers in Wuhan and/or the USA who created what we now know as the initial strain of SARS-CoV-2.

At 10:48, Dr Baric points to the spike gene part of a viral genome depicted in a slide which closely resembles slide 16 in his February 2020 PDF: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/nvac_feb2020_day1_panel2.pdf:

This slide depicts Gain of Function research: chimeric engineering in which the spike gene of a mouse-adapted version of epidemic SARS virus is replaced with the spike gene from each of five wild bat viruses.

The resulting viruses were used to infect a tissue culture of human airway epithelial cells in an attempt to predict which of these bat viruses might be able to mutate, naturally, to cause epidemics in humans. However, if the now partly human-adapted experimental viruses infected humans, naturally occurring mutations might enable them to cause the epidemic disease which researchers are supposed to be trying to prevent.

This research is very similar to that which generated SARS-CoV-2, which was most likely a combination of direct addition of novel codons such as those for the furin cleavage site and, as depicted in the slide, chimeric splicing of segments of different viral genomes together in a way I don’t yet clearly understand, involving cuts made by bacterial restriction enzymes at the restriction sites depicted by red asterisks.

Ralph Baric described this work, which is routine for these researchers, in an even tone of voice which gives no indication of its reckless and potentially disastrous nature. At 10:40:

The spike protein gene mediates species specificity.

The exact design of the spike protein affects the degree to which the virus can infect different species, due, in large part, to different details of the design of the ACE2 or other receptor in those different species.

You can actually [pointing to the diagram] remove the spike gene from these epidemic strains [from the genome of the mouse-adapted version of epidemic SARS] and put these bat genes [spike genes from bat viruses such as WIV1] in place of them.  This was done by Vineet D. Menachery and other people in the [Baric] lab.

Of the five we dropped in, three of these could replicate just fine and use human [ACE-2] receptors for entry.

Evil is an important word.

If it is to have any meaning or purpose at all then it must be a valid description for the actions of people who should know better, deliberately taking actions which imperil the lives of others - especially of millions or billions of people, likely including themselves.

Evil need not be deliberate. Here it takes the form of an egregiously incompetent or foolhardy focus on the intriguing business of virological research, conducted in a way which carries a material risk of causing a disastrous pandemic. Likewise, after the event, failing to realise - or realising and hiding - the extreme recklessness of this line of research. Likewise portraying such research as worthy of funding on the basis that it is a proper, or even the best or essential, path which humanity must take in order to protect us all from pandemic disease.

I say this is evil. I have no formal qualifications in any field, so I am not claiming this is a judgment which anyone should accept on the basis that I am some kind of expert.

Still, it is my right - and my duty - to warn others of dangerous behaviour in the past, especially since it is continuing at a greater pace than before the COVID-19 pandemic, precisely because of the pandemic.

Story-tellers, authors and screenwriters craft their material with cues that enable us to clearly identify the evil ones. So it is easy for us to be sure of ourselves when we boo, hiss, curse or throw rotten fruit at the perpetrators - the ones in the black hats, the ones for whom the score turns menacing.

There are no such cues here. We pass people every day with smiling faces much the same as those of Ralph Baric and his colleagues pictured in the slide. We need to pay attention to this banal evil, enacted by people who are entirely confident of their motives and risk assessments, because this kind of egregious failure in virologists is an evil which has killed millions and will kill many more until society properly regulates their activities.

I am not a virologist, but I believe I know enough about this work to be sure that it was potentially disastrous, and that it differs little in process, or likely outcome, from the research which created SARS-CoV-2. It hardly matters whether the SARS-CoV-2 research was motivated by a desire to predict the pandemic potential of wild viruses, to predict the nature of future human pathogens in order to research vaccines and antiviral drugs, or to generate a bioweapon. All such research generates novel infectious viruses which have the potential directly, or with further deliberate or natural mutation, to cause disease in humans, potentially on a scale which harms or kills billions of people. All that stands between such research and such a pandemic is:

• To what degree the new virus or its mutated descendants are transmissible in humans.

• How well the lab’s mechanical and chemical containment systems work, which depends very much on the exact procedures followed by the individual researchers. As Alex Washburn observes, all it takes is a punctured rubber glove for the researcher to become infected.

We accept the need for BLS4 labs, which provide the maximum possible level of containment, for research on naturally occurring pathogens.

Why should the public, or any virologist, think that 100% successful laboratory confinement (which is an ideal never likely to be attained) should be the only substantial barrier to these deliberately created GoF viruses and their mutated descendants harming and killing millions or billions of people?

Most properly informed people, and all virologists should conclude that the potential benefits of such research are completely outweighed by the risks of a human-generated pandemic. Some virologists do take this view, absolutely. However, there are not enough of these highly principled and knowledgeable researchers to steer the majority of virologists to support a ban on all such gain of function research.

The 2023-07-11 Congressional hearing on the Proximal Origin article

Please take some time to review the material linked to at: vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/ - especially the video of the 2023-07-11 hearing by the United States Congressional House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, in which two authors of the Proximal Origin article, Dr Kristian Andersen and Dr Robert Gerry, make statements and respond to questioning:

www.c-span.org/video/?529219-1/hearing-origins-covid-19

This has 10 second forwards and backwards navigation buttons. The same video can be found at YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byz0LFWUH4g - where the Settings icon enables faster playback speeds.

The Republican majority controls the committee. I think the Republican chairman, medical doctor and US Army veteran Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) does a great job. He is at once clear, incisive, passionate and dedicated to the truth. I think we would have to look back to John F. Kennedy to find a U.S. president with such qualities.

After his opening address, the Democrat Ranking Chair Paul Ruiz M.D. speaks and the witnesses make their prepared statements. From 28:54, Brad Wenstrup questions the witnesses. I recommend this section. Most of all, I recommend his closing address, starting at 2:57:14.

All the Republican members and their staff lawyer are acutely interested in how SARS-CoV-2 originated, and in the corrupting, unscientific, pressures which seem to have caused the Proximal Origin authors to rule out a lab leak, despite numerous statements in their correspondence which indicate that they did not believe such a complete rejection was realistic.

None of the Democrat members nor their staff lawyer showed any interest in the origins of the virus, or in the corrupting influences other than to argue that no such problems existed.

There is a stark divide here, between:

• the Democrat-supported position of the witnesses - and so of the other authors and most virologists - that the virus did not arise from human actions, but instead was created by zoonotic transfer, most likely in the Wuhan Seafood Market, and:

• the position of the Republican members and a minority of virologists that the virus must have arisen from lab-based human engineering.

There are no mid-way positions between these two, nor between the inescapable conclusion which the authors and most virologists, worldwide, as evidenced by their general lack of protest against the Proximal Origin article argue for:

• That the ever-present danger of zoonotic transfer means that virologists much continue to perform gain of function research, to aid pandemic preparedness, including the rapid generation of vaccines, quasi-vaccines using mRNA and adenovirus vector gene therapy technologies, antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies.

and the inescapable conclusion which arises from recognizing that SARS-CoV-2 was created in the lab:

• That such gain of function research as gave rise to this virus must be banned outright, or at the very least confined and regulated to such an extent that accidental release is actually impossible. (I think this cannot be adequately assured.) Since a release could kill tens of millions of people, it makes no sense for the lives of those people to depend on the effectiveness of an lab’s containment arrangements, and the skills of its researchers, no matter how robust they are supposed to be.

Thus, according to the Proximal Origin authors and the majority of virologists worldwide, virological research, including GoF work, should continue and be expanded, because there is no other way of protecting humanity from future pandemics.

However, since SARS-CoV-2 surely did arise from a lab, one or a few virologists, of their own volition, despite all the concerns expressed in recent decades about GoF experiments, caused the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed tens of millions of people and blighted the lives of billions.

Virology and other rogue professions

I believe that the majority, consensus, main body of virologists - all those who are not at present urgently calling for a ban on GoF work - constitute the currently dominant core of a deadly, rogue profession. A search for “rogue profession” on Google indicates that the term is most often used regarding computer games. However, I found references to Prof. George DiMartino’s writing, as early as 2011 blog.oup.com/2011/01/economics/ in which he states that economics is a rogue profession.

A profession does not need to do wholly bad work in order to be reasonably regarded as rogue. Nor need a single member of that profession have any malicious intentions. A rogue profession need only generally support and/or routinely carry out a significant subset of its work in a manner which is completely antithetical to public health and/or scientific rigour. This includes failing to treat or advise on diseases in ways which increase the prevalence and/or severity of the disease, when the information on how to do so is available and could be found and used by these professionals if they were working reasonably astutely. It doesn’t matter what the professionals’ intentions are.

Their sincere belief in the essentiality of their work is of no importance in the question of whether the profession’s activities harm, rather than help, humanity.

Nor does it matter that some or much of their work succeeds fully in its noble goals.

The doctors and surgeons who routinely perform miracles with eye, hip, knee, heart, brain and other types of surgery contribute to the rogue activities of their profession if they do not also inform patients and the public, as they should, what simple, safe, well-researched, effective, nutritional and other non-medical steps people can take to improve their health and so reduce the risks of acquiring a health condition which might require surgery.

This deadly tendency among the majority of virologists does not occur in a vacuum. It could not persist if other professions, or even a sufficiently bold and influential subset of virologists, worked assiduously to end it.

There is a vast, interlocking, network of corrupted groupthunk ineptitude (my phrase) which afflicts the majorities of a number of crucial professions, worldwide. Any one of these professions, if they collectively eliminated their mistaken habits of thought, could, should and probably would work assiduously to disabuse all the other professions of their mistaken habits as well.

For instance, if the mainstream media was doing its job, none of these professions would be able to get away with such deadly habits - such as the majority of the medical profession, misled by the vast majority of immunologists, being unaware of (and sometimes actively opposed to) the knowledge that people need at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25 hydroxyvitamin D for their immune systems to work properly. This is the central theme of most articles here at Nutrition Matters.

I nominate these professions as being rogue, in addition to economists who generally have taken no interest in the obvious benefits of low cost nutritional supplements to reduce healthcare costs and to boost happiness, health and productivity:

• Immunologists.

• Virologists.

• Vaccinologists.

• Public health academics and administrators.

• Legislators, government leaders and high level staff - who all should be paying more attention to nutrition.

• The mainstream media.

• All social media which has accepted, or of its own volition chosen to, suppress debate on matters of health and other matters which are required in order that the general population and professionals in many fields can develop well-informed understanding of numerous important problems and opportunities for improving human health. See Matt Taibbi’s reporting of the Twitter files and now the Facebook files: racket.news.

• The majority of the medical profession, who accepted and/or encouraged government mandated quasi-vaccination campaigns, suppression of early treatments for COVID-19 and suppression of medical debate and freedom to treat patients.

It doesn’t matter that virologists and leading vaccinologists consider themselves the most significant and perhaps heroic protectors of humanity against the scourge of viral diseases.

They are wrong to think this self-serving, research fund generating, core belief which evidently permeates their profession. Likewise the public, many of whom are happy to fund a bunch of PhDs and professors beavering away in labs worldwide, concocting vaccines which they believe are sophisticated, safe, effective, priest-administered, cleansing rituals all good people accept to protect themselves, their families and all of humanity. “We need you to inject this into your bodies. Its for the Greater . . .”:

These people all seem to be possessed of a fervent and unquestioned belief which I dub The Vaccinophile’s Creed, one expression of which:

The only way to stay ahead of the virus is to continue to update the composition of our vaccines and administer them in a regular cadence.

can be found in this this New England Journal of Medicine article:

Project NextGen - Defeating SARS-CoV-2 and Preparing for the Next Pandemic
Xavier Becarra and Ashish Jha, NEJM 2023-07-26.

This is entirely wrong.

The best and most urgently needed action to improve public health does not involve virology, vaccinology or more research. It requires that governments and healthcare professionals support and encourage, without brow-beating or manipulation, well-informed, unpressured, adoption of vitamin D3 supplementation, for the great majority of the population, to attain at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune systems need to function properly. Supplementation is easy and inexpensive. For most people, this is the only safe way to attain this level - which is 2 to 10 times the 25(OH)D level of many people who do not supplement vitamin D at all, and who have not recently exposed their ideally white skin to significant quantities of ultraviolet B light.

Please see the research articles cited and discussed at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ and brownstone.org/articles/vitamin-d-everything-you-need-to-know/.

I doubt any author could devise a horror story with such a pervasive enmeshment of intertwined and mutually supportive evil - most of it clueless, tribal and springing from the best of intentions - as the one which must now clearly identify and then dismantle.

I will write more after reading the material listed at vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/ - including especially Alex Washburne’s Substack articles: alexwasburne.substack.com.

Austin, Texas based Brownstone Institute - a prominent think tank / publishing organization concerned with socio-political issues and especially the disastrous COVID-19 pandemic response - has published an article Simon Goddek www.drgoddek.com and I wrote:

brownstone.org/articles/vitamin-d-everything-you-need-to-know/

Please comment and ask questions in the Comments section below.

There are, of course, many more technical things to know about vitamin D, including concerns about raising 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels to at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L, and so perhaps to twice this. Some such concerns, such as increased risk of kidney stones, are well known among medical professionals. In order to understand to what extent these concerns are real, I will need to read a great deal more research.

There would be, no doubt, some ill effects for some people with higher than 50 ng/mL levels, and most people can’t have their level tested to carefully calibrate their vitamin D3 intake to attain a narrow range of levels such as 50 to 70 ng/mL.

25-hydroxyvitamin D levels below 50, for some people, and probably below 40 ng/mL for most or all people, result in weakened innate and adaptive immune responses to cancer cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses, and to greater risk of excessive inflammatory responses. So it makes sense to aim at least 50 ng/mL unless the person is known to have some problem with higher levels.

This article explores why the great majority of doctors and immunologist have little knowledge of, or interest in, the importance of the three vitamin D compounds for the immune system. The article also covers molecular mechanisms and observations and trials which indicate how important vitamin D3 supplementation is to everyone’s health.

There’s an upbeat robotic audio version at the top of the page. This does a remarkably good job, including of uncommon words such as “hydroxyvitamin”, “intracrine” and “paracrine”.

At top, center right, there is a pull-down menu to show the article translated into: German, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, French, Romanian, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, Armenian, Hindi, Arabic, Swahili and Chinese.

Here are some of the graphics from the article, with links to the research they depict.

Pre-infection 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 levels and association with severity of COVID-19 illness
Amiel A. Dror et al. PLOS ONE 2022-02-03.

with histograms of 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels from:

Traditionally living populations in East Africa have a mean serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration of 115 nmol/L (46 ng/mL)
Martine F Luxwolda et al. British Journal of Nutrition 2012-01-23.
(Maasai and Hadzabe - I calculated an accurate histogram) and from:

The link between vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 in a large population
Ariel Israel et al. Medrxiv preprint 2020-09-07.

Association Between Preoperative 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Level and Hospital-Acquired Infections Following Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass Surgery
Sadeq A. Quraishi, MD, MHA; Edward A. Bittner, MD, PhD; Livnat Blum, BA; Mathew M. Hutter, MD, MPH; Carlos A. Camargo Jr, MD, DrPH
JAMA Surg. 2014;149(2):112-118 (Published 2013-11-23.)

A simplified table of vitamin D3 supplemental intakes as ratios of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity:

Please see the discussion in the article, and at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#sjw-updated-ratios for how these are derived from this article by New Jersey based Emeritus Professor of Medicine, Sunil Wimalawansa:

Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19
Sunil J. Wimalawansa Nutrients 2022-07-21.

I believe that the ratios above are the best answer - for people of all ages and of all body weights and types - to the frequently asked question: How much vitamin D to take?

Please remember that I am an electronic technician and computer programmer. Simon Goddek has a PhD in biotechnology. Our purpose in writing is not to have you think our opinions are a reliable guide to nutrition. We primarily want to encourage people to read the research we cite, for themselves - or to encourage someone they trust who can understand it to read and evaluate it for them, such as a doctor, nurse, immunologist or nutritionist.

Ideally there would be a consensus article from the most experienced vitamin D researchers and clinicians with recommendations such as these, with a full account of the arguments against attaining generally 50 to 80 ng/mL (and occasionally higher) 25-hydroxyvitamin D, with a reliable assessment of to what extent such concerns are real.

Corruption, malevolence and tribal, madness-of-crowds animosity have a profound impact on everything, since they reduce most people’s ability to learn what they need to know, by suppressing, hiding and misrepresenting pertinent discussions. So does ordinary groupthink - the natural tendency to think that all the people whose opinions we agree with, really have got it right and that alternatives to their understanding of reality are not worth listening to.

The importance of having at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D is clear to those few who are familiar with the research: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/.

The challenge is to bring doctors, immunologists, public health officials and the mainstream media up to speed on this.

Ideally, we would have a consensus statement by the world’s leading vitamin D researchers and clinicians (some are both) which answers the simple question: “How much vitamin D3 to take?” with the daily quantity being a ratio of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity, since they have difficulty converting vitamin D3 to 25-hydroxyvitamin D and retaining the latter. New Jersey based Emeritus Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa wrote an article on this last year, in Nutrients: Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19. The ratios are summarised at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#sjw-updated-ratios. Prof. Wimalawansa’s article also recommends and explains the need for a single oral dose of 0.014 mg calcifediol (which is 25-hydroxyvitamin D) to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels safely over 50 ng/mL in four hours, in clinical emergencies such as sepsis, COVID-19 or any other acute illness in people whose levels are too low.

The barriers to this being known to all of humanity are primarily in the minds of doctors and immunologists, who generally find it hard to imagine that most people’s immune systems are crippled through lack of any nutrient.

Those who understand the immune system’s need for more vitamin D than most people ingest or make in their skin need a lot of help raising awareness of this.

Medical doctors have high defenses against anyone trying to convince them to think differently. For fear of being considered a (sound made by ducks) many are understandably averse to thinking or stating something which challenges mainstream medicine. Government moves to control doctors - including their ability to discuss alternatives to the mainstream consensus and government policy - make this groupthink much worse.

I recently gave a doctor my one page flyer (PDF and PNG):

with the Boston hospital graph showing post-operative infection rates rising drastically the further pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels were below 50 ng/mL. I explained the graph and she said this was interesting and that she would take a look a the research at that page. If most doctors were prepared to consider that mainstream medicine might have overlooked the importance of nutrients, such as vitamin D3, information like this would spread rapidly among them and most people would be much better nourished, healthier and happier.

Vitamin D advocates need help. I can easily imagine Matt Taibbi boldly raising awareness of this.

Elon Musk vs. Matt Taibbi

He wrote a great article on his Substack, which has its own domain name: www.racket.news/p/meet-the-censored-me

Racket News

Meet the Censored: Me?

Nearly five months ago I was presented with a rare opportunity, to look through internal correspondence at Twitter. A small group of other journalists and writers soon jumped down the rabbit hole to join the one-in-a-million search. At the time the company was just completing a contentious sale, which featured multiple stops, starts and legal actions, along with competing furious public relations campaigns. New owner Elon Musk accused the old regime of lying about the…

Read more

2 years ago · 1141 likes · 379 comments · Matt Taibbi

The second half of the article is only available to subscribers. I subscribed to his Substack in the past - and subscribed again today, for a year, because I think he does such great work. At the end of the article he describes his recent falling out with Elon Musk. The background is:

• Twitter is a tremendously important site for exchanging ideas in brief format - 280 characters plus images and videos. Journalists and all sorts of people with something to say find it a vital way of learning about what’s up and raising awareness of whatever they think is important. (I subscribe to Twitter for the latter reason, and to support ideally uncensored social media which depends less, or not at all, on advertising which favours click-bait and outrage.)

• Twitter has for years been biased against those who question the mainstream, left-leaning narrative in politics and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic response.

• Elon Musk bought Twitter outright for USD$44B in order to improve its support for the free exchange of ideas, to make money and to build it into a larger set of functions, including payment systems.

• The left-leaning mainstream media has been pitching a fit since then, taking every opportunity to portray Twitter as failing and/or becoming a hot bed of hate speech. Watch an overconfident young man (James Clayton), from woke-compliant government broadcaster the British Broadcasting Commission, accuse Elon Musk, face-to-face, of allowing the growth of hate speech on Twitter, including tweets which are “slightly racist, slightly sexist” - and coming unstuck when he can’t cite a single example:

  twitter.com/CensoredMen/status/1646075238378098688

  33.6M views in 24 hours.

• In late 2022, Elon Musk opened up Twitter’s “dirty laundry” records to investigators, including especially Matt Taibbi, to report on the previous management's acceptance and support of systematic, formal (but secret), user-specific and broad-brush influence on Twitter's content moderation by US government agencies and by supposedly independent non-profits which were in fact partly funded by the US government. This is the Twitter Files investigation. Matt Taibbi summarized the first month of these reports, to 2023-01-05, here. Wikipedia has an updated summary.

• In the last few years, startup Substack has enabled many people to write without fear of censorship, and so reach readers who are genuinely interested in whatever they have to say. Substack supports long-form articles and lively, thoughtful, discussion in the comments, which are not appropriate or possible in other systems - especially Twitter: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/substack-supports-extraordinarily .

• A week ago, Substack announced a short-form Substack Notes system substack.com/notes, apparently modeled on Twitter, for real-time exchanges to complement its subscription based, Substack articles system.

• A few days ago, Elon Musk / Twitter accused Substack of trying to draw Twitter users into this competing system, and suppressed all tweets linking to Substack articles.  Such tweets could not be liked, would not appear in notifications and could not be found in the search system, though all these constraints except the search suppression have since been lifted.

• The contradiction of freedom-of-speech Twitter suppressing a similarly free-speech, much smaller, competitor - rather than competing normally, such as by improving Twitter - is a real brain burner. Matt Taibbi wrote on “the WTF week to end all WTF weeks”.

The Vitamin D Awareness Mission

A year or two ago Matt Taibbi asked his Substack subscribers to suggest topics worth investigating.  I didn't write then about vitamin D and the immune system, but today I wrote a comment in the above article suggesting a new mission.  He's very busy, but it doesn't hurt to ask:

Hi Matt, We need complex, hierarchical systems to run things like airlines, healthcare, the Internet, Substack and Twitter. Some of these are run by private enterprise and the rest by governments - potentially parasitic entities, one of which grows in every country - which forcibly monopolize the ability to print money, make laws, arrest, detain and kill.

The overall task is to prevent the all-too-often corrupt, malevolent and/or dim-witted people who run these things from fucking things up for everyone. Elon Musk's attempt to obliterate Substack shows he can be part of the problem, as well as the solution.

This task extends to the mainstream medical profession, which has acceded to and supported the mandatory administration of poorly tested, dangerous, ineffective mRNA and adenovirus vector quasi-vaccines for COVID-19, withholding numerous safe, effective, *inexpensive* and so unprofitable early treatments for COVID-19 https://c19early.org and to government control of doctor’s care for their patients and ability to discuss this freely.

A little known aspect of the systemic failures of mainstream medicine is that most doctors do not understand the immune system's complete dependence on adequate levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, made in the liver from ingested or UV-produced vitamin D3.

In the fullness of time, your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to accelerate the awareness - among the public and the medical profession - of most people's need for proper vitamin D3 supplementation so they attain at least the 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L, 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the bloodstream which their immune systems need to work properly. Currently most people only have 1/10th to 1/2 this. This leads to 11 million people dying every year from sepsis https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32989-7, to pandemic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, to almost all of the deaths from these diseases, and to a plethora of other forms of ill-health.

There's very little vitamin D3 in food, fortified or not, so a "balanced" diet doesn't help. Ultraviolet B skin exposure can produce sufficient vitamin D3 to raise 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels (hydroxylation is mainly in the liver) to at least 50 ng/mL, but this always involves DNA damage and so raise the risk of skin cancer. This is only naturally available from high elevation sunlight on cloud-free days, without being blocked by glass, clothing or sunscreen. Those with dark or black skin would need this kind of exposure over much of their body, most days, to build up enough 25-hydroxyvitamin D to be healthy.

Vitamin D3 supplements are the only practical way of getting most people's immune systems to work properly. Fortunately, intakes up to every 10 days are fine and the required quantities are minuscule. For 70 kg 154 lb body weight without obesity, 0.125 milligrams (5000 IU) a day is sufficient. This is a gram every 22 years and pharma-grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram ex-factory.

Overall, humanity needs about a tonne a day. So this is USD$1B a year plus the cost of splitting it into small capsules or tablets to be taken every week to 10 days. No amount of healthcare, drugs or vaccines can bring everyone to good health as long as their immune system is crippled by inadequate 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.

Your awesome curiosity, skills, achievements, principles, work-ethic, and both good and trenchant humor make you especially suited for this mission. Furthermore, your wife is a medical doctor who can help you navigate and assess the veracity of the most pertinent research on vitamin D and the immune system: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ (Co-signed by Patrick Chambers MD, Hawaii.)

Money-sucking vampire squids are fingerings compared to the corrupted groupthunk ineptitude which holds the majority of the medical profession in its clutches - and so the health of all humanity.

This blindness to body’s need for more vitamin D than most people get today is in stark contrast to the frequently brilliant work by bright, hard-working, well-intentioned doctors and nurses. Hardly anyone can imagine most of them could be overlooking anything so important - but they are. The same happened with handwashing and the dangers of smoking.

The vampire squid reference is to Matt Taibbi's 2010-04-05 Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs The Great American Bubble Machine.

(Links to the research articles whose results are depicted above: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#vc.)

Doctors need to work in better systems than the ones which constrain them now

(This section added on 2023-02-18, two days after I wrote this article. See also the footnote added on 2023-04-08.)

Below you will find a series of arguments, including that, at least in Western countries, the majority of doctors (or at least that subset of the profession which worked with governments, who strongly constrain all doctors' actions) allowed one or more crimes against humanity to take place.  These include:

• Most or all people being denied safe, well-researched, early treatment for COVID-19.

• Misleading promotion of quasi-vaccines being used on - and frequently forced upon - hundreds of millions of people, despite these treatments being far less safe and effective than the public was lead to believe. 

• Infection acquired immunity was - and still is - discounted. Those already infected were - and still are - expected to keep getting quasi-vaccine injections, despite the risk of adverse effects and the likelihood of developing tolerance to SARS-CoV-2 infections. 

• Hospitalised elderly people were isolated from their families. So they often died without ever seeing them again. 

• Socially, educationally and economically devastating lockdowns and school closures were enforced on entire populations.

Many of our best and brightest devote their lives to medicine - to caring for us all, warts and all.  How did the systems they work within lead so many of them to supporting - or at least being unable to prevent - these terrible government-mandated actions?

Medical doctors take on life-and-death responsibilities, having to make treatment decisions in minimal time, often with little or no support and based on limited and sometimes incorrect information.  Ideally they would have the ability to apply a vast amount of knowledge, reliably, to each situation - but the situations are messy and this is an inhumanly large body of knowledge. 

Ideally a doctor would know, or have immediate access to, the best research in any given field. However, doctors have no time to read the reams of research in all the aspects of human health they encounter - and the task of identifying what really is the best research is even more time-consuming than reading and understanding it.  Instead, they generally must rely on the best guidelines they can find - or are forced to comply with by insurers, administrators, professional associations and licensing boards.  So doctors are generally only capable of practicing according to strict, narrow, guidelines which may be ineptly and/or corruptly decided upon by remote committees.

We have to find a way through these recent and continuing crises in medicine and public administration which supports doctors continuing in their profession.  No-one else has what it takes to be the primary workforce - with nurses, dentists, psychotherapists and other professionals - to care for all the medical problems which emerge throughout our lifetimes.

Medicine - and general practice - has always been a battleground of conflicting arguments, policies, regulations and economics.  Too many doctors are burning out and quitting the field altogether.  Some are committing suicide.  See, for instance, Louise Stone MD's article about General Practice in Australia: https://insightplus.mja.com.au/2022/41/are-doctors-really-parasites-healthcare-system/ . 

We - as individuals as well as through our governments, which supposedly serve us - need to care for our doctors better than we have been.  How can we ensure that these bright, devoted, talented, people have secure, satisfying careers caring for us, the public - while being free of the growing burden of unreasonable constraints which are making their work impossible?

It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry has far too great an influence on medical research, journals, training and guidelines.  Regulatory agencies are all too frequently captive to the industries they regulate (videos and transcripts: Christopher Cole of the FDA, Dr Jordon Walker of Pfizer).   These are massive, decades-old, problems.

What I wrote below is intended to outline the seriousness of what has occurred and is still occurring - in part to support the statement which got UK MP Andrew Bridgen into such trouble.  It might read like some experienced old medical gentleman writing a thunderous Editorial for the Times of London.  However, I am an electronic technician and computer programmer.  I haven't even done a first aid course.  Please evaluate my arguments carefully.

There are good reasons to be angry that the majorities of whole professions - or at least the subset who influenced government policy - have failed to protect us.  But something much more subtle and constructive than anger is needed to prevent such things from happening again. 

Doctors are pushed, constrained and criticised from all directions.  I believe that a proper understanding of the many failings of the COVID-19 pandemic response will add to this.  We need our current and in-training doctors.  I believe we must help them work in a much better system.

My part in this is raising awareness of the nutritional needs of the human body - especially our immune system.

Why I wrote this

If the COVID-19 pandemic response had been properly directed, everyone in the world, since early 2020, would have known that without proper vitamin D3 supplementation - or recent high level ultraviolet B (ideally white) skin exposure at levels which raise the risk of skin cancer - 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the bloodstream are a fraction of the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L (1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) the immune system needs to function properly (see graph below). Most people have only 5 to 25 ng/mL and so are subject to much higher risks of harm and death from COVID-19 compared to the risks for people who have at least 50 ng/mL.

This article is in two parts. Firstly, a description of the pandemic response being responsible for the vast majority of deaths due to COVID-19 - and also (though I don’t attempt to explain this below) massive harm and death due to the response itself: economic disruption, business and employment devastation, educational and social disruption, loss of trust in the medical profession and a much larger extent of quasi-vaccine injuries and deaths than the mainstream medical profession currently acknowledges or attempts to treat.

For an example of the mainstream, avoidant, response to injuries and deaths caused by the mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 quasi-vaccines, see how the immediate and continuing neurological harm caused by a Pfizer COVID-19 quasi-vaccine injection to the wife of a well known and highly respected Australian doctor, Dr Kerryn Phelps, has been ignored by the responsible authorities, mainstream doctors and the mainstream media: news.com.au/...dr-kerryn-phelps-reveals-devastating-covid-vaccine-injury-says-doctors-have-been-censored.

I originally wrote these arguments in comments on a Trialsite News article which criticised UK MP Andrew Bridgen's now-deleted tweet that "this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust". This article also asserted that the COVID-19 vaccines saved lives: https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/british-mp-vaccine-injured-wont-be-taken-seriously-for-previous-outlandish-commentsaccidental-f496783d. (I subscribe to Trialsite News. This is an excellent site to learn of, and discuss, recent developments in medical research.)

I also posted an earlier version of the text below as comments to an important 2023-01-16 article by Robert Malone, which contains a video and transcript of Andrew Bridgen’s address to parliament on these matters:

The second part of what follows is an argument in support of Andrew Bridgen's now-deleted tweet that "this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust". I have taken the “this” in his statement to mean not just the mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 quasi-vaccine campaign, in its fullest sense (with misleading propaganda and forcing people to be injected in order to retain their employment) but the full pandemic response. I include lockdowns, social distancing and masking, which was enforced, along with the quasi-vaccines by a coalition of professional groups, including denying the value of, and the banning of, nutritional responses and all of the growing number of genuinely safe and effective early treatments which are inexpensive, and so are not patented and highly profitable - https://c19early.org and https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/the-fda-cdc-and-most-other-western.

The pandemic response killed millions - and seriously harmed harmed hundreds of millions or billions - of people

The Trialsite News article stated ". . .  the benefits of the immunization program still outweighed the risks, . . .".  This is not the case for those who were seriously injured or killed by the mRNA and adenovirus vector quasi-vaccines, and who were very unlikely to have suffered such harm if they had contracted COVID-19 without being subjected to these hastily developed experimental treatments.

In broad population terms the above claim is often made and accepted as true.  However, this particular quasi-vaccine campaign was not the only option - especially with these experimental gene therapies being unreasonably promoted to and/or forced upon people against their will, including many who were not elderly and so were at low risk of harm from COVID-19.

The proper response was always to ensure that the innate and adaptive immune responses of individuals and of whole populations were maximised by proper nutrition.  Average, normal (without proper vitamin D supplementation) 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels of 5 to 25 ng/mL are a fraction of the 50 ng/mL needed to achieve this.  The most pertinent research on this and on vitamin D3 supplemental intakes as ratios of body weight are at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ .

The table at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#sjw-updated-ratios summarises the recommendations of Prof. Sunil Wimalawansa: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997 in Nutrients for proper vitamin D3 supplementation quantities to attain at least the 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels the immune system needs to function properly. For instance, for 70 kg 154 lb body weight, without obesity: 0.125 milligrams (5000 IU) vitamin D3 a day. This is a gram every 22 years - and pharma-grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram.

The second graph at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#4.2

shows clearly how in the summer of 2020, in the UK, R0 (the average number of people and infected person pass the disease on to) for the original (or very early) Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2 was well below the 1.0 or greater value required for pandemic transmission. This was in the the absence of lockdowns, extensive masking or social distancing, and quasi-vaccines. 

All that had happened to that point in time was that some of the most vulnerable in the population (primarily those with the lowest 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels) contracted the disease (either dying or surviving with immunity which prevented re-infection) AND the terribly low average 25-hydroxyvitamin D level of winter rose significantly to its summer peak.  (50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L is well above the top of the above graph.)

Even though this average, for people with white skin, was still only half of the 50 ng/mL needed for full innate and adaptive immune responses, this (and a similar increase in the much lower average levels among those with brown or black skin) was enough to reduce transmission to the point where only 795 COVID-19 patients were in hospital in late August - 4% of the 19,617 of four and a half months earlier.   From September onwards, cases and hospitalisation rose due to a spread of a more transmissible variant and the seasonal fall in 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.

Transmission depends primarily on the number infected and the number of viruses each infected person sheds. This is greatly reduced with the reduction in disease severity which occurs when the immune system works better, as it does the closer the 25-hydroxyvitamin D level is to 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L or more. Such a healthy 25-hydroxyvitamin D level probably only marginally reduces the chance of infection for a given viral insult.

Low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels also greatly increase the risk of hospitalisation and death. Most of those hospitalised have lower 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels than the population averages depicted above. This is the primary reason why people in the UK with brown and black skin suffered far greater rates of transmission (within their communities), harm and death than those with white skin.

Increased indoor and in-vehicle air temperatures and reduced humidity in the winter months probably plays some role in the seasonality of COVID-19, influenza etc. but most of the well-known seasonality is due to 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels:

Nutrition Matters

COVID-19 seasonality is primarily driven by low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in winter-spring

There is a well-known seasonality of influenza in countries 30 degrees or more from the equator. From Cannell et al. 2006: Epidemic influenza and vitamin D. (Redrawn from the original in Hope-Simpson 1981.) COVID-19 seasonality is much the same - it is caused primarily by moderate fluctuations in population average 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels…

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3 years ago · 9 likes · 8 comments · Robin Whittle

Proper supplementation takes the 25-hydroxyvitamin D level of each individual to 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L or more - well above the normal seasonal range of unsupplemented individuals, and so suppresses both transmission and severity far more strongly than the UK population average 25-hydroxyvitamin D boost from summer sunshine. There’s no way of proving it, but I expect that if everyone had at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, that even with no prior immunity or early treatment, even the most transmissible current Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2 would not spread rapidly, except perhaps in very closely mixed situations, such as within a single household, hospital, aged-care home, prison or ship.

Not only should proper vitamin D3 supplementation have been encouraged and supported, starting with the aged, healthcare workers, pregnant women and those who are incarcerated, but a growing number of early treatments should have been made available to everyone upon diagnosis.

I am one of the people who have been raising awareness of this since late March 2020. New Jersey Emeritus Professor of Medicine, Sunil Wimalawansa, first wrote about it in January 2020, in an article published (due to the urgency, unfortunately not in a properly peer-reviewed, PubMed indexed, journal), on 1st March 2020: “Global epidemic of coronavirus - COVID-19: What can we do to minimize risks”: https://www.ejbps.com/ejbps/abstract_id/6656.

This combined vitamin D (and ideally other nutrients) supplementation and early treatment pandemic response is what the actual quasi-vaccino-centric response should be compared to.  For almost all people in a population properly nourished and treated in this way, the benefits regarding serious harm and death of quasi-vaccination would be insignificant, but the enormous costs and level of harm from this quasi-vaccination campaign would have been the same.

(Novavax has a genuine COVID-19 vaccine. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA injections and the AstraZeneca and J&J adenovirus vector injections are all gene therapies by the EU definition: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A32003L0063. Part IV 1: includes nucleic acid programming of the cell to produce specific proteins, without modification to the cell’s DNA. Vaccines contain antigens which induce an immune response. These treatments program our cells - potentially any cell type, anywhere in our body - to produce such antigens in very large quantities, on their cell surfaces and in the bloodstream. Furthermore, the contents of the mRNA injections is poorly characterised, but is know to contain fragmented and otherwise erroneous mRNA molecules, with unknown impacts on the proteins our cells are programmed to produce: sashalatypova.substack.com/p/nobody-knows-what-is-in-the-vials.)

Multiple whole professions approved and pushed this pandemic response, deliberately or at least egregiously ignoring and denying the benefits of nutrition and early treatment with inexpensive drugs.

The best known, officially banned or suppressed, early treatment for COVID-19 is ivermectin https://c19ivm.org/meta.html. See Dr Pierre Kory’s account of this and its criminal suppression: pierrekory.substack.com/p/the-timeline-of-major-battles-in-c8e.

Another safe and highly effective anti-viral early treatment is melatonin, which is a natural hormone, available without prescription in the USA: https://c19early.org/jmeta.html (no negative randomised controlled trials to date) and recommended in the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’s protocols: https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/ .

These protocols also recommend a single oral dose of 0.014 milligrams per kg body weight of calcifediol, to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels over 50 ng/mL in 4 hours. This is by far the most important early treatment for COVID-19, sepsis, severe influenza, Kawasaki disease, MIS-C etc. for the great majority of people who have 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the 5 to 25 ng/mL range, due to insufficient - or no - vitamin D3 supplementation and little or no recent, high level, UV-B skin exposure.

Calcifediol is 25-hydroxyvitamin D. It goes straight into circulation, while even a 10 mg (400,000 IU) oral dose of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol takes about 4 days to attain 50 ng/mL, due to the delays inherent in it being hydroxylated, primarily in the liver.

Nutrition Matters

Calcifediol to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D above 50 ng/mL in 4 hours

The urgent need for at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L 25-hydroxyvitamin D (The final section was updated on 2022-02-26.) Important update 2022-03-08: The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium (Dr Paul Marik, Dr Pierre Kory, Dr Joseph Varon and colleagues) have updated the PDF version 16 of their MATH+ hospital protocol for COVID-19 to recommend a single…

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3 years ago · 19 likes · 22 comments · Robin Whittle

Neither vitamin D3 cholecalciferol nor 25-hydroxyvitamin D calcifediol are hormones: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds.

These nutritional and inexpensive early treatments were suppressed and banned because it was collectively agreed, amongst the majorities of the following professional groups, that they would distract from the goal of tackling the pandemic solely with experimental quasi-vaccines (and later overly-narrow, expensive, monoclonal antibodies and not very safe or effective, expensive, patented drugs), social distancing, lockdowns and masks. 

The professions whose majorities acted and continue to act in unison are:

• Doctors.

• Nurses.

• Immunologists.

• Epidemiologists.

• Virologists.

• Vaccinologists.

• Public health administrators.

• Legislators.

• Government officials.

• Those who work in and and manage mainstream print, electronic (TV and radio), Internet mass media and the main social media companies. 

In the West, the consensus position of all these professions was egregiously mistaken.  The majorities of all these professions all operated in concert.

Of these professions, medical doctors have the clearest responsibility to protect and be truthful to patients and the public.  A handful of doctors objected to the mainstream pandemic response and were ignored, derided and/or deregistered. 

The mainstream body of doctors could easily have put a stop to this disastrous government response by insisting on proper nutrition for immune system health, full access to safe, effective, early treatments and a cessation of all government and medical board attempts to limit the freedom of medical professions to discuss, advise and prescribe their chosen treatments. 

That they did not is an extraordinary betrayal and collective professional failing.  Government attempts to corral doctors to follow the quasi-vaccino-centric mainstream narrative would not have lasted more than a few days if doctors had collectively rejected this medical censorship.

Stating ". . .  the benefits of the immunization program still outweighed the risks, . . .".  as if it was a fact is just supporting this collective professional failing at a time when it needs to be fully exposed and discussed.

The pandemic response has been - and continues to be - a massive crime against humanity

Update 2023-02-26: > > > Below, I argue that this response is the most deadly crime against humanity since the Holocaust. I have left the text unaltered, but I now believe it to be the second biggest, unless it can be established that the combined death toll due to COVID-19, the pandemic response and all their direct and indirect effects exceeds that of Mao Zedong’s 1960 to 1962 Great Leap Forward. This crime against humanity was not included in the two lists I cite below, which were for wars and genocides.

In 1999 Prof. Vaclav Smil reported https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/ estimates of “23 to 30 million excess deaths, and unpublished Chinese materials hint at totals closer to 40 million”. These estimates are about twice the 17.3 million figure I derived below from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The 6.78 million figure below is for reported COVID-19 deaths. In May 2022, the BBC reported (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60981318 and https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61327778) WHO analyses which concluded that nearly 15 million people had died (global excess deaths), including 4.7 million in India, which is about ten times the reported deaths in that country.

I have no expertise or interest in exact death tolls. It suffices to state that the pandemic death toll - which could have been almost entirely prevented with vitamin D and early treatments - is a crime against humanity on a scale of death which makes it comparable with the Holocaust and the Great Leap Forward. This does not imply that the intentions of the perpetrators were the same. < < <

In a now deleted tweet (referred to at twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1613132027041320961:

"As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust",

Andrew Bridgen MP was not arguing the two crimes are identical, or even similar.  He was stating that “this” (I guess the quasi-vaccines themselves, or more likely the totality of their use including the suppression of nutritional and low-cost early treatment approaches) has had a greater impact - caused more suffering, harm and death - than any other crime against humanity since the Holocaust.

Deliberately and forcibly using state and corporate capabilities, including propaganda, to incarcerate, torture and kill millions of people of particular ethnicities, sexual orientations or disabilities is a different crime against humanity than what I described above. 

There is no legally binding definition of "crime against humanity", but the UN page https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-humanity.shtml states that "it is not necessary to prove that there is an overall specific intent."

The internal cogitations of the perpetrators matter little when their actions cause suffering, harm and death on the massive, personally indiscriminate, scale the UN document describes.

The professional groups I mentioned above are all paid by the public, individually and collectively, to protect the public and to be truthful.  We should be able to trust all the individuals in these professions. We most especially should be able to trust the consensus position and actions of whole professions such as these.

Instead the mainstream consensus behaviour of all these professions was to lie and avoid and disparage the truth about the likely ineffectiveness and safety of the quasi-vaccines.  For instance, the majorities of these professions worked together to scare and coax the population to work towards 70% “vaccination” with the claim that this would suppress the pandemic by achieving herd immunity. Collectively these professions did not admit to the public that the quasi-vaccines were never tested for their ability to reduce or prevent transmission, or that no such vaccine has ever been developed against a coronavirus. Anthony Fauci was one of the greatest proponents of these mRNA and adenovirus vector quasi-vaccines. He should have known all along about their weaknesses - such as those he and his colleagues admitted in early 2023: “Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses and other respiratory viruses”, Cell Host & Microbe 2023-01-11: https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(22)00572-8 .

That would be bad enough, considering their actions lead to hundreds of millions of people accepting these ineffective, sometimes seriously harmful or deadly, injections due to threats of loss of jobs, or of the ability to mix in society, and due to unrealistic fears and promises which were generated by the cooperating groups of professionals.

However, these professionals’ collective actions involved much more than that. They enforced a systemic suppression of nutritional and early treatment approaches to tackling the virus which lead to its very high transmission rate and to the great majority of deaths which occurred.

This was - and still is - a cluster of egregious professional failings, each one of which had such devastating consequences that it fully meets the UN criteria for "crime against humanity".   Properly handled, this pandemic could have been rapidly suppressed with proper vitamin D supplementation, starting with those most at risk, and multiple early treatments as knowledge of these developed.  The death toll would have been a small fraction of the current total.

If most of the residents of Wuhan had had at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D in mid 2019, their immune systems would have worked properly and SARS-CoV-2 would probably never have spread to the point of being an epidemic, even in that city. There would have been no global pandemic.

One account of the Holocaust's death toll:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution does not give a total number of people killed. However, it lists 6 million Jews and (in the larger figures of other categories of people who were killed) at least 11.3 million non-Jews. By this account, the Holocaust killed at least 17.3 million people.

In February 2023, the Worldometer page https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ displays a figure of 6.78 million reported deaths from COVID-19, which involves over-estimates (those who died "with" COVID-19) and underestimates - such as due to uncounted deaths in India and due to the quasi-vaccines, and other aspects of the pandemic response, not least people failing to the the medical attention they needed.

This 6.78 million exceeds the death toll of any one war since the Holocaust, according to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll and of any one genocide since those which were part of the Holocaust listed at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides.  (I have no expertise in the Holocaust, wars, genocides and their death tolls.  These tables indicate, approximately, the death tolls involved in these events.)

Because I consider the pandemic response is the sole or primary cause of the great majority of deaths attributed to COVID-19, I support what Andrew Bridgen wrote. 

I do not see this as any insult to the victims of the Holocaust - who were killed very deliberately.  I attribute the impetus behind the collective behaviour of professionals who enacted the COVID-19 pandemic response cluster of crimes against humanity as a massively complex and distressing series of corrupted and otherwise mistaken beliefs and motivations, which for convenience I refer to as "corrupted, groupthunk ineptitude".

I regard this cluster of crimes against humanity as number 2 in a time ordered series of related and continuing such crimes.

The 1st was the gain of function research - funded by the United States government, and carried out both in the USA and in Wuhan China - which lead to lab release of the virus which was the initial SARS-CoV-2 variant. I plan to write an account of this in the future, but for now see the documents at: https://www.projectveritas.com/news/military-documents-about-gain-of-function-contradict-fauci-testimony-under/, Andrew Huff PhD’s book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60585293-the-truth-about-wuhan and recent interview: https://www.brighteon.com/fac6915b-bde3-4939-961d-13c733daefe0 and the research by Alex Washburne and colleagues which I cite and discuss at: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/corrupted-groupthunk-ineptitude-in.

I propose that the 3rd in this series of crimes against humanity is the failure of Western and the Chinese governments - and of the responsible medical authorities all over the world - to vigorously investigate all the arguments for SARS-COV-2 being a lab release, in the context of there being zero evidence of it resulting from zoonotic transfer. (Multiple lines of research show that SARS resulted from zoonotic transfer.)

I propose the 4th crime against humanity is that, as Alex Washburne pointed out, there is now a very much greater amount of gain of function research into coronaviruses, which threatens to cause further lab-releases, each with the risk of a further global pandemic. This is due to poorly regulated funding of virological research prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Footnote 2023-04-08:

In a detailed and thoughtful essay "A Unifying Theory of Evil" https://brownstone.org/articles/a-unifying-theory-of-evil/ , rogue anthropologist Haley Kynefin (https://therogueanthropologist.substack.com) discusses "the banality of evil and criminal responsibility" and related matters. 

She quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from The Gulag Archipelago:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. 

She cites a study which indicates that "people in Western industrialized societies tend to absolve ignorance of wrongdoing more often than members of rural traditionalist societies." 

I am with the rural traditionalists on this, at least regarding immunologists and doctors suppressing safe, effective, inexpensive treatments while supporting dangerous, ineffective, poorly tested, never before used, gene therapy quasi-vaccines for COVID-19.  This is not a case of a bystander to an accident not knowing how best to care for an injured person.  These are highly trained, well paid, professionals who we all rely on.   It is their job to know how the immune system works, and to protect the veracity of their understanding of biology and medicine through vigilance against corruption, social contagion, government browbeating and outright propaganda.

A significant proportion of critics of the COVID-19 pandemic response attribute such disastrous harm largely or entirely to people in positions of power and influence who acted with deliberate intent to harm and kill.  I argue that a lot of the harm was done by rank-and-file professionals, who did not set out to harm or kill. 

In a recent Substack comments discussion https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/my-op-ed-on-three-of-the-most-important/comment/14173662 erin wrote: "in some areas there are no evil BIgwigs. And in some areas there are. And in some areas there are lots of evil (or cowardly) Littlewigs."

Some people think I am trying to get these people off the hook, but ignorance and moral disengagement (see Haley Kynefin's essay) are egregious failings in highly trained professionals.  

I am trying to interest those who believe strongly in what Haley Kynefin calls "the cartoon villain" model of COVID-19 evil causation - just as Alexander Solzhenitsyn described - in considering why so many professionals supported and enacted the harm.   This broad-based enactment of harm is what we need to prevent in the future - and to prevent right now, since it continues to this day.

We need to understand what went systemically wrong in so many professions, whose members earnestly set out to promote truth and health - and wound up doing the opposite.  

Soundly based moral judgments about who is responsible, and in what ways, are a starting point.  We need to understand the systemic pressures on well-meaning, intelligent, individuals which lead to their actions being so at odds with their intentions. To this day, many think they did - and are still doing - the right thing, such as dismissing ivermectin and other early inexpensive, safe, effective early treatments (https://c19early.org) and continuing to urge people to get their umpteenth booster.

Only then might we have a chance of improving how society is organised, to make us all robust against social contagion and propaganda.  Part of this will be more sophisticated expectations of what health-care professionals should do to reduce the chance of these patterns of disastrously faulty groupthink emerging again in the future. 

I am arguing strongly for the guilt of these well-meaning people, since they all should have fought the hysteria and propaganda which deflected them from their proper work (a few did), rather than succumb to and support it.

I am also arguing that we need to recognise the tremendous challenges inherent in being a medical doctor, and somehow hold these people accountable, expect them to adopt some new (yet to be defined) way of thinking and feeling about their work and the world at large, without engaging in a  broad-brush condemnatory campaign against these people, which might make many of them leave the field.

I have no idea how to do this.   Who we gonna call? 

Haley Kynefin is an anthropologist with a focus on myth, morality and philosophy.  Check!

Kevin Bass is a medical doctor in training who has degrees in medical anthropology and biology.  Check!  He wrote a ripper of an apology about being part of the mistaken pandemic response, as if he was speaking on behalf of many doctors, most of whom are yet to recognise this.  I am perplexed that many pandemic response critical people have judged his apology, in a 2023-01-30 Newsweek op-ed: https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scientific-community-admit-we-were-wrong-about-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630, as disingenuous - and accused him of being a fascist.   Kevin Bass is now writing at: https://covidcommentary.substack.com - but those who judged him so harshly do not seem to bother reading his work.   

A medical anthropologist sounds like just the kind of specialist we would call regarding systemic failures in the majority of the medical profession.  However, for me, the most practically important of these failures is doctors' ignorance or denial of the importance of 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D for proper immune system function. Yet, as far as I know, Kevin Bass has not taken any interest in this, despite my efforts to entice him to read the research at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ .

Biologist Naomi Koh Belic PhD www.naomikohbelic.com wrote an Australian Broadcasting Corporation story www.abc.net.au/news/health/2022-11-11/ibs-irritable-bowel-syndrome-tiktok-hot-girl-stigma/101562030 with an accompanying Instagram video www.instagram.com/reel/CgOZxNVjfd3/ on Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

She improves vastly on the Hot Girl (Walk) meme established by influencer Mia on Tik Tok www.tiktok.com/@exactlyliketheothergirls/video/6933363802649955589 - and tells the world that she suffers from IBS.

There was no mention of vitamin D or helminths, so I established an Instagram account and wrote a suitably informative comment. However, I could not post it. I guess it was too long. It seems the Instagram comments system does not support well-referenced scientific discussion. Who knew??

Below is an illustrated and somewhat elaborated version of my comment. I will try to link to this article in a comment under the Instagram video.

A Google Scholar search for IBS and "Vitamin D" leads straight to Chong et al. 2022 Vitamin D supplementation for irritable bowel syndrome: A systematic review and meta-analysis: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jgh.15852 which shows that vitamin D supplementation, well above the lousy 0.05 mg (200 IU) a day recommended by the 2006 Australian government guidelines www.eatforhealth.gov.au/nutrient-reference-values/nutrients/vitamin-d, significantly reduces IBS symptoms.

Such searches for all sorts of diseases, chronic health conditions and cancer lead to interesting research regarding vitamin D, since most people get so little that their immune system is crippled in-utero and from birth until their (frequently accelerated) death.

In research which should be known to every doctor, immunologist, virologist and public health official, Quraishi et al. 2014 jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/1782085 showed that the lower the pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D AKA 25(OH)D level in the bloodstream was below 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L (1 part in 20,000,000 by mass), the greater the risk of both post-operative surgical site infections and hospital acquired infections. 

Above 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L, the risk of each type of infection was about 2.5%.  At 25 ng/mL 75 nmol/L - which is more than most Australians have in winter, unless they supplement vitamin D properly - the the risks rose to about 15% - a factor of 6.

This shows beyond reasonable doubt that innate and adaptive immune responses against bacterial pathogens are profoundly weakened by 25(OH)D levels below 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L.  25(OH)D

is produced in the liver from ingested or ultraviolet-B created vitamin D3 cholecalciferol.  It is the circulating compound that many types of immune cells need to supply their vitamin D based intracrine (inside each cell) and paracrine (to nearby cells) signaling system.  The level of circulating 25(OH)D does not signal anything. It is not acting as a hormone. It is a raw material immune cells need, since they consume it when their vitamin D based intracrine/paracrine signaling system is activated.

(All medical professionals understand how 25(OH)D is used by the kidneys to produce a very low circulating level of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, which acts as a hormone - a long-distance, blood-borne, signaling molecule - to control calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. Some recognise, broadly, that “vitamin D” is important to the immune system - and may mistakenly assume that immune responses are affected by this very low level of 1-25(OH)2D.)

These vitamin D based intracrine (AKA, not quite accurately “autocrine”) and paracrine signaling systems are not related to hormonal signaling. The immune system does not use hormonal signaling. These two signaling systems play crucial roles in how each individual cell alters its behaviour in response to its changing circumstances. These signaling systems are activated by a different condition for each cell-type. When the system works, the changes to cell behaviour are, likewise, different for each cell type. You will frequently read that “vitamin D is a hormone” and that “vitamin D regulates immune responses”. For more on these mistakes - which are common even among people who write vitamin D research articles - please see Reinhold Vieth 2004 sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.jsbmb.2004.03.037, and: vitamindstopscovid.info/02-intracrine/#02-nothorm.

I have two hefty, recent (Janeways 9th) and current (Abbas 10th) edition, highly respected, immunology textbooks:

Many people, such as those with dark or black skin and/or sun-avoidant lifestyles have 25(OH)D levels below 15 ng/mL and sometimes as low as 5 ng/mL - a tenth of what their immune systems need to function properly.  These disastrously low 25(OH)D levels - less than half of  the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L the immune system needs - are normal in many countries, including Australia.

Even in sunny Israel, Arab (primarily Muslim, with typical all-covering clothing and sun avoidant lifestyles) have a median 25(OH)D level of about 12 ng/mL 30 nmol/L - 1/4 of what their immune system needs to function properly. (Israel et al. 2020 The link between vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 in a large population www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.04.20188268v1.)

In addition to weakened innate and adaptive responses, low 25(OH)D levels lead to excessive, self-destructive, indiscriminate cell destroying, dysregulated inflammatory responses.  Chauss et al. 2021 www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01080-3 (my explanation of this dense cell-biology article: aminotheory.com/cv19/icu/#2021-Chauss) showed that Th1 regulatory lymphocytes from the lungs of hospitalised COVID-19 patients were unable to transition from their pro-inflammatory startup program to their anti-inflammatory shutdown program, even though the condition which signals (a high level of a complement [WP] protein) to do so was detected and so activated the cell's vitamin D based intracrine signaling system. The primary or sole reason this signaling system did not work, causing each Th1 cell to remain pro-inflammatory, was insufficient supplies of 25(OH)D.

IBS [WP], like numerous other autoimmune disorders, is caused by excessive inflammation.  Inflammatory responses are primarily needed to defend against multicellular parasites, such as intestinal worms, AKA helminths [WP].  Humans were ubiquitously infested with helminths until about a century ago.  Helminths long ago evolved to emit multiple compounds which downmodulate the inflammatory responses of their hosts - including those of our ancestors.  Our ancestors evolved stronger inflammatory responses to counter this downmodulation.  The same is true of most or all mammals.

Now, without helminths, our inflammatory responses are generally stronger than what is healthy for us.  For genetic and other reasons (exposure to particular compounds or organisms) some people have such strong inflammatory responses that they suffer one or more of a vast array of chronic autoimmune inflammatory disorders, including IBS, Crohn's disease, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma etc.

This lack of helminths would cause some of these problems if everyone had the 25(OH)D they need, but most people have half or less of this.  Most people's immune responses to bacterial, fungal and viral infections - and to cancer - are greatly weakened by low 25(OH)D levels, which also greatly exacerbates the proclivity to self-destructive inflammation.

So it is not surprising that helminthic therapy helminthictherapywiki.org - deliberately infecting oneself with a relatively benign species of helminths - suppresses IBS and many other inflammatory diseases.  One 48 year old woman had "out of control fibromyalgia, IBS and rheumatoid arthritis" to the point where she "started picking out a new wife" for her husband.  She wrote helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/TSO_relieves_fibromyalgia,_IBS_and_rheumatoid_arthritis that introducing pig whipworm into her intestines "relieves fibromyalgia, IBS and rheumatoid arthritis".

It is also possible to suppress IBS and other such diseases, without helminths, by increasing 25(OH)D levels, as Chong et al. showed.  The Coimbra protocol, for medically supervised 25(OH)D levels - typically much higher than 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L - successfully suppresses the same set of diseases.  See Amon et al. 2022: www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1575 and, for Crohn's disease: coimbraprotokoll-de.translate.goog/2020/04/01/judi-sklerose/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en .

The vitamin D people tend to know nothing about helminths and the helminthic people tend to know nothing about vitamin D.  Immunologists in general - and so most doctors - know nothing about either.  They are much more interested in patented, and so profitable, drugs.

For more on the Coimbra protocol please see: coimbraprotokoll.de/en/scientific_principles/ and on vitamin D, helminths and excessive inflammation: vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/ .

There's very little vitamin D3 in food or multivitamins, so a "balanced diet" does not help.  UV-B exposure of white skin can produce plenty of vitamin D3, but this is not generally available except in the middle of cloudless summer days with no sunscreen, glass or clothes covering the skin.  The same UV-B always damages DNA and so raises the risk of skin cancer. 

Supplements are the only practical way of attaining healthy 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels all year round.  For 70 kg 154 lb bodyweight, without obesity, 0.125 mg 5000 IU a day will enable most people to attain this in about 3 months.  This is a gram every 22 years - and pharma-grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram ex-factory.

All sounds too simple?  Please read the research cited in Prof. Sunil Wimalawansa's (CV) recent article in Nutrients www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997/htm and in my extensive page, with Patrick Chambers MD (see his work on vitamin D, magnesium and COVID-19): vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ . 

This includes a table which summarises Prof. Wimalawansa's body weight ratio based vitamin D3 supplemental intake recommendations: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/index.html#sjw-updated-ratios .   For people suffering from obesity, or chronic inflammatory conditions - including IBS - he recommends 90 to 140 IU per kg bodyweight vitamin D3 per day, on average. For 70 kg, this is 0.157 mg 6300 IU to 0.25 mg 10,000 IU per day.

Australian retailers are not allowed to sell capsules containing more than 0.025 mg 1000 IU vitamin D3. My wife Tina and I get 12.5 mg 50,000 IU capsules from Bio-Tech Pharmacal in the USA, who financially support two vitamin D researchers I know. These and 50,000 IU capsules from other companies can usually be obtained from Australian eBay sellers.

It is fine to take vitamin D3 every week to 10 days. I am 70 kg and take a one 1.25 mg 50,000 IU capsule once a week. This is 0.178 mg 7143 IU / day, plus 0.05 mg 200 IU / day from a multivitamin.  At ex-factory prices, this capsule contains 1/3 of a US cent worth of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol.

I haven't bothered to get my 25(OH)D level tested.  It is most likely between 60 and 100 ng/mL (150 and 250 nmol/L), which is fine with me. 


I am an electronic technician and computer programmer who collaborates with vitamin D researchers in raising awareness of this terribly neglected nutrient, not least to reduce transmission and severity of COVID-19.  My purpose in writing is to prompt you to read the research yourself.  Don't take my word for any of the above.

Here are some arguments (in 4 - Virology research dangers below) that a disastrous pattern has emerged, which must be reversed if we are to prevent further pandemics like COVID-19: that virology research created the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19, that the same type of research continues to this day and that it is being performed by many more researchers, in many more labs, with greater fervency - and lack of proper regulation and safeguards - precisely because of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased public funding and support for this inherently reckless research.

The text below is primarily comments I made to two beautiful, important, articles by Alex Washburn, in his Substack alexwasburne.substack.com :

The first article alexwasburne.substack.com/p/a-synthetic-origin-of-sars-cov-2:

describes his work with two colleagues which analyses the genome of two early Wuhan variants of SARS-CoV-2 in ways which have not been attempted before and which reveal patterns which could only result from these being recently descended from a synthetic, chimeric, laboratory engineered, virus. This is an advanced layman level summary of their pre-print (not formally reviewed by others, but in fact, having benefited from review by multiple experts in the field):

Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen
bioRxiv 2022-10-20 (Preprint.)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1

The second article is Alex’s explanation of his scientific and moral principles, the background to the above research, and his response to recent criticism: alexwasburne.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-the-world:

I would be very happy if you stopped here are read these two Substack articles. I lack the time and expertise to fully evaluate the bioRxiv article, which I have not read.

Below are two of the three comments I made to the first article and one I made to the second. You may find these interesting, but they are not an attempt to summarise or represent what Alex’s articles contain.

Housekeeping

I have not written a Substack article in 3 months, primarily due to concentrating on paying work. I have made some improvements to the submission I wrote, and which Patrick Chambers MD co-signed, to a UK government enquiry into vitamin D. They did not receive this submission, but I have improved to make it by far the best single document anywhere which cites and discusses research on vitamin D and the immune system:

vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/

I plan to write some Substack articles as guides to the most important aspects of this. For now:

• For why everyone should supplement vitamin D3 in sufficient quantity to raise their circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D to at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L level their immune system needs to function properly: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-quraishi .

• Vitamin D supplemental quantities as ratios of body weight: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#sjw-updated-ratios . For instance, for 70 kg 154 lb body weight, without obesity or several other conditions of ill-health, 70 to 90 IU per day per kilogram bodyweight, with the lower ratio being 1/8th of a milligram a day = 125 micrograms, also known by the scarily high number of “5000 IU” per day.

• Ordinary daily vitamin D3 cholecalciferol intakes take months to raise 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Bolus (single high dose) vitamin D3 intakes such as 10 mg take about 4 days. For clinical emergencies, such as sepsis, COVID-19, Kawasaki disease, MIS-C etc. 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels can be boosted safely over 50 ng/mL in about 4 hours with a single oral dose of calcifediol, which is 25-hydroxyvitamin D. For 70 kg body weight, just 1 milligram is sufficient: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/calcifediol-to-boost-25-hydroxyvitamin .

Please also see the July 2022 article in Nutrients by New Jersey based Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa which concerns many of these subjects, and from which the above-linked body weight based vitamin D3 supplemental intake recommendations come from: Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19: www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997/htm .

The image above is from Walt Disney’s 1940 animated musical anthology, Fantasia. This is the part of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasia_(1940_film)#The_Sorcerer's_Apprentice_2 in which Mickey Mouse’s attempt to destroy an errant and indeed demonic broom made matters very much worse. I cite this segment, from www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DX2yVucz24&t=340s in 4 - Virology research dangers below.

“Corrupted groupthunk ineptitude” is shorthand for the sprawling morass of failures which are such a prominent and egregious feature of mainstream medicine today, alongside its many brilliant achievements and benefits. I had not heard of “groupthunk” before, but there is a book with this name.

Numbers 1 and 3 of my three comments in response to Alex Washburn’s 2022-10-21 article: A synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 . My 2nd comment was a quick account of how most doctors do not understand the immune system’s need for 50 ng/mL 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

1 - Queries about techniques for producing chimeric viruses

Thanks very much to you and your colleagues!  Here are some questions prompted by reading your explanation/summary, above, and glancing at the article itself, which I lack the time and expertise to read and understand properly.

I found this Substack article via German COVID-19 (and other matters) super-sleuth eugyppius: www.eugyppius.com/p/new-evidence-for-sars-cov-2-lab-origins (426 likes and 222 comments. This is a Substack site accessible via the author’s domain name.)

I understand that a typical approach to researching viruses such as these is to copy (with an enzyme) the viral RNA into DNA and then to physically break the DNA into multiple segments of a convenient general size, ideally (this is probably essential) with the breaks resulting in each segment containing one or a few important genes.  Then, by some manipulations, take out one or more of the segments and introduce other broadly similar, but different in detail, segments, with suitably (and very finely crafted) sticky ends so they naturally reassemble themselves into a complete piece of DNA which can be copied into RNA.  The new RNA therefore contains primarily chosen segments from two or more sources as well as traces of the restriction sites and sticky ends.  This can easily be introduced into a cell's cytoplasm (using electricity to break holes in the cell membrane) where the ribosomes go to work on the RNA and produce the proteins it encodes, thereby causing the cell to produce a bunch of viruses containing the same RNA. (One of those proteins is an enzyme which copies the original RNA so a copy can be encapsulated in each virus particle.)

I know enough about cell biology to be reasonably confident that the above is a general description of this way of working with viruses.  However, I lack the expertise to know where to look for answers to the following questions.  If you can answer them, or point to relevant articles, I think it would help quite a few people understand your work and the likely origins of SARS-CoV-2.

You mention that in order to make the restriction sites where the DNA will be cut, it is necessary to alter the viral RNA (before its information is copied to DNA) so that particular short patterns occur, which constitute the restriction site to which a given endonuclease enzyme binds, and so cuts the DNA.  I understand that with great care - and I guess some necessary preconditions which enable this to be done only in certain parts of the genome - that it is possible to create these restriction sites by individual base-pair en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair changes which alter each codon of three base-pairs en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#Codons in a way which does not change the amino acid (or start or stop function) each codon codes for:  hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Organic/gencode.html .  (Such changes are known as silent mutations.)

(1) How do researchers make these individual base-pair changes to viral RNA?  I know researchers have electronic files of the exact base pairs of numerous particular viruses which have been discovered or synthesized.  As far as I know there are also services (or machines which can be run inside the researchers' lab) which can be given a file of base pairs and will produce a set of RNA molecules, each having that sequence of base pairs.   If so, then why bother with DNA, slicing and reassembly when it would be easier to edit the file and order up the exact RNA which is desired?   I can easily imagine there are cost and/or practical restrictions which make this impossible or undesirable.

However, at present I have no understanding of how individual base-pairs in viral RNA can be altered, with precision, other than by synthesizing the whole RNA according to an electronic file.  Likewise the base-pair changes which remove existing restriction sites.

(2) I understand that in your tables and graphs, you chose two of the now countless thousands of SARS-CoV-2 variants as examples of early (Wuhan) variants: SARS2-WiV04 and SARS2-Whu1. Can you give us non-specialist readers an understanding of why you chose these two. Quick Google searches lead me to: https://gisaid.org/wiv04/ .  "WiV04" gets 15k hits, but there are only 22 hits for this and "WHu1".

(3) Assuming that the restriction sites you identified in both the WiV04 and WHu1 variants delineate the ends of discrete segments of the genome, can you tell us anything about the the characteristics of each of these segments?  This is beyond the scope of your work, but it would enable us to understand how researchers might have copied an entire segment from some particular strain of some other coronavirus either complete and intact, or with some modifications.

3 - The pandemic response and cover-up of its origins are arguably a greater crime than the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus

It would be interesting to see a similar analysis of the earliest Omicron variant genomes, since their emergence is profoundly mysterious, given their only known, non-lab, links to other SARS-CoV-2 variants go back to mid-2020.  I recall suggestions that these were a lab escape from research in South Africa.  If so, perhaps there would be distinctive signs of such research in their genomes.

Whoever made the initial virus in the lab knows very well that the pandemic would not have occurred if either they had not done this research or if their containment methods were adequate.   It is reasonable to assume the lab escape was in the Wuhan lab.  I recall reading of reports of illness among some lab workers, and that this preceded the 2019-10-18 to 27 Military World Games which spread the disease within Wuhan and then to the countries of contestants: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11845-020-02484-0 .

No matter where the work was done, the lives of those involved and who are covering up their work would be in peril if their actions were to be revealed, due to their government (not just the Chinese government) being so hell-bent on suppressing this information, but also due to popular hatred and fear that the same researchers may cause another disaster.

So the actual experimenters and probably dozens or hundreds of people around them know exactly who did the work and when it escaped.

It could be argued that this work was the crime of the century, to date.  However, here are some arguments as to why both the quasi-vaccine-centric pandemic response (at last in most developed countries) and the continuing cover-up are greater crimes.

The original lab-escape occurred with a strain of virus which resulted from what was - and probably still is (such as the recent 80% kill Boston variant) standard procedure in many virus research labs.  As such, the particular actions of these researchers were unremarkable - probably dozens to hundreds of teams all around the world have been, and probably still are, creating chimeric viruses.  I can understand the scientific value in making such chimeric viruses, and I can imagine major difficulties in virus research if all such activities were banned outright.

In terms of culpability, creating the chimeric variant is arguably very low, since so many well-respected researchers were doing the same thing all over the world.  One could argue, with hindsight, that the researchers were highly culpable because their containment methods failed.   However, to what extent were their containment methods significantly less likely to fail than those used in other labs?

While it is difficult to separate virus research from research into bioweapons, since any research into improving immunity can also be weaponized by aggressive nations by applying this to their population, at present I don't know any convincing arguments that the research was driven partly or entirely for the purpose of biological warfare.   If it was, then the researchers' culpability is extraordinarily high.

In terms of outcome, it is easy to argue that the effects of the research and lab escape were monumentally harmful, and so culpability of the researchers should be assigned accordingly, with some consideration as to how much they should have anticipated such an outcome.

However, I argue that the pandemic response itself has been a far greater crime in two dimensions.  Firstly in terms of the egregious and at times sociopathic neglect of and/or hostility to the real needs of the public, and secondly in terms of the severity of the outcome.  These are massive subjects, but the harm caused by social-distancing, lockdowns, masking, quasi-vaccines, vaccine mandates, censorship of discussion, especially by medical professionals, and the resulting distrust of medical professionals, politicians and law enforcement have arguably caused more harm than the virus itself.   A particularly harmful and inexcusably reckless or deliberate aspect of the mainstream pandemic response was - and still is - the suppression, demonization and banning of all forms of early treatment, with the obvious purpose of corralling the public into accepting the quasi-vaccines, at least until the multinational pharmaceutical companies devised their own, extremely expensive, and not very useful, early treatments.   Even if one did not know about vitamin D, this banning of early treatments on such a scale is arguably the real crime of the century to date.

The continuing cover-up of the origins of the virus is a strong contender for the crime of the century to date.  This and other research shows there is such a cover-up, by dozens or hundreds of people and the organisations and governments for whom they work.

By deliberately preventing humanity from understanding the origins of this great disaster, those covering their actions contribute to fear, lack of action to prevent a recurrence, and to distrust of authorities, as well as to thwarting everyone's reasonable desires for a clear, scientific understanding of what happened, and for those responsible to be held accountable.

I believe that part of this cover-up extends to the whole field of virology.   Collectively, virologists should have known, from early 2020 - and should all know now - that this pandemic occurred due to the work of virologists.   Why then have there been inadequate steps to research the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and to identify those who were responsible?  Why has there so far been no prominent, global, discussion and action taken by virologists and regulators to ban, or reliably safeguard, whatever research techniques resemble the actual work which resulted in this release?

I fear we are rapidly entering an age of more and more numerous and more serious breaches of trust and responsibility by whole professions and by governments regarding freedom of speech, scientific rigour, determination of responsibility and concerted regulatory action to prevent a recurrence.  For instance, what if the Boston variant was highly virulent and transmissible in humans and/or other animals AND it happened to escape confinement?

4 - Virology research dangers

My comment in response to Alex Washburn’s 2022-10-21 article: alexwasburne.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-the-world.

Salute!

It had not occurred to me that the pandemic response involves a proliferation of exactly the same type of virology research which created SARS-CoV-2.  A handful of virologists are aghast at this and the remainder are oblivious or covering their collective asses by denying the risks in order that they can keep sucking at the billions of dollars engorged mammary glands of the internationally government funded and popularly celebrated Medical Research Industry.

Sci-fi novelists and video-game authors could not conceive of such twisted scenario: Generally good-hearted people, thinking they are doing much the same as the ideals to which you truly aspire, by their research into understanding and preventing disease, create pathogens which escape and cause far worse and more widespread disease than in prior experience.  The corrupted groupthunk ineptitude which permeates mainstream medicine, government, immunology and virology (virtually none of these people realise how weak and pro-inflammatory the average person's immune responses are, due to lack of 25-hydroxyvitamin D vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ ) leads them, with public support, to increase the amount of viral research which, in the absence of suitable regulation and even proper recognition of the perils, means more and more chimeric and otherwise engineered pathogens will be produced in the lab, with each such experiment being like Russian roulette with the bullet in the chamber being another COVID-19 scale pandemic.

Each such pandemic is the seed particle upon which rampant corrupted and otherwise harmful responses grow, further weakening society and further driving the reckless quasi-vaccination programs, oppression and still more dangerous virology research.

All this in an unsustainable economic setting, with increasing levels of government overreach and outright censorship and suppression of dissent.

I thought immediately of Mickey Mouse chopping up the troublesome broomstick only to find that unintended consequences made this a very bad idea: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DX2yVucz24&t=340s .

If only this was a game or a dystopian novel.  Instead, it is as deadly and forcefully real as a stranded car being shredded by a freight train and its occupants' bodies being turned into mincemeat. 

While some of us might escape the actual infection, none of us can avoid our lives, and the lives of everyone we know and depend upon, being vastly disrupted, dispirited and traumatised by what has occurred, and what will be even more likely to occur in the future unless the true origins of SARS-CoV-2 AND the vitamin D starved and so weakened immune systems which enabled its rapid transmission and destructive impact are widely understood, and suitable steps taken, in all countries, to prevent these problems in the future.

The vaccine-centric COVID-19 response is an unprecedented global disaster.

It is a spectacular outgrowth of long term problems due to doctors not correctly advising people on nutrition.

Proper vitamin D3 supplementation vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#06-ratios would greatly reduce the incidence of many chronic and acute diseases. It would largely prevent sepsis, which kills 11 million people a year: www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32989-7. This is 20% of deaths worldwide, each one horrible, as the immune system’s wildly dysregulated inflammatory responses destroy cells indiscriminately, leading to hypoxia and fatal organ damage. (Lack of helminths - intestinal worms [WP] vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/#02-helminths also contributes to excessive inflammation, as does lack of sleep: Irwin 2019.)

If most people had good vitamin D levels, 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L 25-hydroxyvitamin D - well beyond what most doctors think are needed - then neither influenza nor COVID-19 would be transmissible at epidemic level, since disease severity and so viral shedding would be greatly reduced. Those who were infected would be much less likely than at present to be harmed or killed - because their immune systems would be working much better than they do today.

The current crisis is also a terrible turn for the worse in the millenia-old struggle between populations and the corrupt, pernicious, actions of the governments they fund, rely upon and to varying degrees choose or tolerate. To read my rant about each population having a spot on which a potentially parasitic government-thing grows, please see the comments on an analysis by Peter Nayland Kust of China’s property, banking and debt crisis: newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/real-estate-crisis-banking-crisispolitical/comments.

There is hope amid the gloom. Firstly, Kemi Badenoch seems destined to make a tremendously positive impact on the governance of the UK:

Common Sense

England’s New Conservative Superstar

At a small dinner party earlier this year—months before Boris Johnson resigned and she threw her hat in the ring to become prime minister, coming closer than anyone predicted—Kemi Badenoch, the 42-year-old MP for the Essex market town of Saffron Walden, was absorbed in fixing the TV so that it pl…

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2 years ago · 686 likes · 260 comments · Zoe Strimpel

She is likely to inspire and direct many in government to follow proper principles and do much better than at present - and to encourage more like-minded people to enter politics and public administration. [Note added after publication: I am being optimistic, hoping that someone who is so detail-oriented and prepared to think in ways which differ from others in the government might read about vitamin D and the immune system and take appropriate action. I will write to her. I understand she has been a strong supporter of the vaccine-centric approach to COVID-19.]

Secondly, Internet communications provides many opportunities for facilitating understanding and constructive action, though it also empowers those who frighten, cajole, misinform and bully others. Substack is great. See my lists of other Substacks and appreciation for the level of uncensored discussion this company supports. Such Internet communication systems to some extent counter the numerous ways in which Internet social and mainstream media facilitate communication - and now government action - based on fear, anger and impatient, ill-informed thinking:

bad cattitude

generating a sense of crisis so people will demand "solutions" is not a basis for government

we live in a strange time informationally. never before has so much information been available for those wishing to seek it out, yet this has not resulted in the golden era of truth and science that…

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2 years ago · 620 likes · 377 comments · el gato malo

In the uncensored, positive, tradition of Internet communications, independent medical news and discussion site TrialSite News www.trialsitenews.com stands out. I suggest anyone interested in medical research and policy will find the USD$5 a month subscription well worthwhile. Comments are moderated and can be up to 3000 characters.  I have encountered no censorship.

In a 2022-07-25 article:

www.trialsitenews.com/a/bureaucrats-bombshell-as-dr.-birx-declares-we-overplayed-vaccines-only-hope-for-elderly-now-paxlovid-testing-ed750c81

TrialSite founder Daniel O’Connor discussed what it would take to recover from the current disaster.

The comment I wrote to this concerns the entire shebang - the great malaise we find ourselves in. There is no escape. Even if, by wise, auto-didactic learning and self-care we can look after our own health, and the health of our loved ones, without these being harmed by the many corrupt and otherwise inadequate aspects of medicine, we still live in a world in which the majority of people suffer and die unnecessarily because of these. We are still subject to the lockdowns, the fracturing of society, and the mountains of debt and/or taxation by which governments finance their inept and/or corrupt programs.

It would take weeks to write a dozen or so articles citing the most important developments this year in COVID-19 evolution, mRNA and adenovirus vector quasi-vaccine# effectiveness and problems, corruption of medicine etc. I bookmark dozens of items a day, but I will never be able to write such a thing. I wrote about an FDA staffer’s admission of corruption in the FDA: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/regulatory-capture-of-the-fda.

# I use the term “quasi-” because these treatments do not resemble vaccines. They use messenger RNA to cause our cells to manufacture proteins to give the immune system target practice. They are a form of gene therapy, albeit one not intended to alter DNA. This was admitted in 2021 by the president of Bayer. The fact that these treatments have been referred to as “vaccines” and that this has generally been accepted involves a change in the definition of the term, and so is contentious - because in the mind of most people, this linked them, unreasonably, with genuine vaccines in the past. See: www.trialsitenews.com/a/are-the-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-a-form-of-gene-therapy-yes-according-to-a-bayer-pharma-exec-moderna-98a5b0b1. Some background on the US Centers for Disease Control changing their definition of “vaccine”.

In the next few weeks I plan to write articles here concerning:

• A simple guide on how much vitamin D3 to take. For now, see the charts at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#charts.

• Why conventionally recommended vitamin D3 intakes are so inadequate. For now, see: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#05-history.

• A simpler account of using calcifediol (which is 25-hydroxyvitamin D) to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels safely over 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L in clinical emergencies, so the immune system can work properly. For now, see: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/calcifediol-to-boost-25-hydroxyvitamin.

Here is a somewhat elaborated version of my comment.

Christine Anderson [WP], who lives in Fulda, right in the middle of Germany, is one of the 96 German Members of the European Parliament. She surely has practice in plain-speaking, since her goal was to "lead Germany out of this EU nightmare". Here is her assessment of the global COVID-19 response:

Jennifer Arcuri @Jennifer_Arcuri

“Biggest scandal in medical history.” - @AndersonAfDMdEP

3:22 PM ∙ Jul 24, 2022

---

18,498Likes8,354Retweets

2022-07-28 update: Christine Anderson’s complete speech is in the video after “Watch the full 1hr 30min event here:” at summit.news/2022/07/27/member-of-european-parliament-labels-covid-vaccine-coercion-worst-crime-ever-committed-on-humanity/. The excerpt above is at 19:39:30.

This vaccine campaign will go down as the biggest scandal in medical history. Moreover, it will be known as the biggest crime ever committed on humanity.

Two world wars are tough competition regarding it being the greatest crime against humanity. However, Earth’s population was 1.9 and 2.4 billion for those wars, which affected only a subset of humanity.

Most of the 8 billion people now alive have been at least economically affected by COVID-19 and the misguided and/or criminally inadequate attempts to curtail it. Millions are dead. The official death toll of 6.38 million people is partly an over-estimate because some or many died with COVID-19, not because of it. It is surely an under-estimate since the official figures from India in 2021 were likely an underestimate and because the total death toll includes currently largely unacknowledged deaths due to the quasi-vaccines, economic downturns, social isolation and lack of medical care.

Tucker Carlson is especially angry about the way COVID-19 quasi-vaccines have been foisted on the world, with those who refuse the injections being sacked, defamed and prevented from seeing their loved ones in hospital. This 2022-07-21 program was evidently banned from YouTube: article.wn.com/view/2022/07/22/THE_COVID_VACCINE_SCAM_Tucker_Carlson_07_21_2022/.

Everyone should be at least this angry.

If this whole medical disaster was just the world being led astray by a few evil or misguided people at the top, we could identify the culprits, punish them, exclude them from office in perpetuity, try to cope with the harm they caused and move on with principles and laws to prevent any re-occurrence.

However, in Western nations at least, the impetus for the initial COVID-19 response - mRNA and adenovirus quasi-vaccines to the exclusion of everything else - was taken up with enthusiasm, vigor and force by governments, health administrators, medical professionals, immunologists, virologists etc., celebrities and by a large proportion - often the majority - of the general population.

They pushed this experimental quasi-vaccines on themselves and everyone else.  This continues to the present day, even though chasing these variants with a narrowly targeted spike protein from 2020 makes no sense. 

It made no sense in 2020. Coronaviruses were well known to mutate rapidly and all attempts at producing an effective vaccine against human corona viruses had failed.

covariants.org/per-country

In the USA there have been 7 greater than 50% dominant COVID-19 variants in 2.5 years - 4 of them this year.

The Omicron variants originate from an early- to mid-2020 evolutionary branch. Delta was displaced from 96% prevalence in the two weeks to 6th Dec 2021 to 0.3% in the two weeks to 17th January 2022 - by which time Omicron BA.1 made up 97% of the genomes sequenced. Since any specifically targeted vaccine takes 6 to 9 months to develop, produce and widely deploy (assuming months or years of safety testing is not done, which it should be), such narrowly focused interventions will generally be far out-run by such rapid viral evolution.

The past, current and future epidemiological dynamic of SARS-CoV-2 Francois Balloux et al. 2022-06-22 Oxford Open Immunology doi.org/10.1093/oxfimm/iqac003.

Medical professionals were - and still are - to some degree constrained by governments, but their responsibility, like everyone else's, is to the people. They should have pursued the truth, made recommendations according to the highest principles and so explored every option for prevention and treatment. A few did. The great majority did not.

Instead, nutritional and drug treatments were ignored, derided and/or banned in order to focus the public's attention on the quasi-vaccines. Many or most doctors were caught up in the mass hysteria and so legitimised, promoted and were guided by its false tenets.

In 2021 and 2022 the real nature of the vaccine-centric focus became clearer. 

Vaccines are sometimes effective and essential. However, they are widely credited with capabilities which exceed reality. For instance, most people believe that influenza vaccines reduce hospitalisations and death - but multiple research studies show that they don’t to any discernible degree: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/influenza-vaccines-do-not-reduce-1da.)

Vaccines are attractive to many people because they are handed down from on high (multi-billion dollar companies with their labs and factories) and administered, like a cleansing ritual, by priestly, or at least elevated, figures - doctors and nurses. (Can anyone explain what is going on with doctors in the USA so often wearing white coats and dangling stethoscopes around their necks? Here in Australia, doctors dress well, but like ordinary people.  Canada?)

It was a mistake to promote these mRNA and adenovirus vector injections as vaccines. (Novavax is a vaccine.) No-one had ever widely deployed a treatment which genetically programmed humans’ cells to produce toxic viral spike proteins (with a suitably modified structure, but there could also be errors, and so novel proteins) on their cell membrane for the express purpose of being used as target practice by the immune system.

Bayer president Stefan Oelrich in October 2021:

The president of Bayer’s Pharmaceuticals Division told international “experts” during a globalist health conference that the mRNA COVID-19 shots are indeed “cell and gene therapy” marketed as “vaccines” to be palatable to the public.

“If we had surveyed two years ago in the public – ‘would you be willing to take a gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?’ – we probably would have had a 95% refusal rate,” stated Oelrich.

Governments and many medical professionals, immunologists etc. are so overly-enamoured of (supposedly) glamorous, high-tech, narrowly-targeted, interventions that they now support a wider range of treatments: monoclonal antibodies and now anti-viral drugs. (Unlike the quasi-vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, the anti-viral drugs work against all variants.) 

The common factor is that the treatments are patented, expensive and so highly profitable.  They are not better tested, more effective, or safer than many of early treatments now available: c19early.com. (See the FDA-approved ones: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/the-fda-cdc-and-most-other-western.) 

No level of incompetence can explain this - the only possible reason for this is corruption of governments, medicine and research and academic publishing related to health and nutrition.

This would not persist if most of the mainstream media critically examined this extreme government support of multinational pharmaceutical companies. However, with rare (usually conservative, rather than left-leaning) exceptions, the mainstream broadcast and Internet media companies have completely supported this program. This is easy to understand due to the massive advertising revenues which flow from pharma companies. The same is true of most social media companies, which have complied with government demands to censor “disinformation” - much of which is fair criticism of the vaccine- and lockdown-centric program.

The Australian government ordered 300,000 courses of Molnupiravir [WP] in October 2021 (pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-43603) before any test data was released, and two and a half months before the FDA approved it for emergency use. The price was reported as about USD$600 a course.

In July 2022 www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/22/government-urges-take-up-of-covid-antivirals-as-almost-500000-in-australian-stockpile-near-expiry-date just 97.4k of these courses were prescribed, which is probably just as well given the safety concerns regarding DNA damage and viral mutation.

500,000 courses of Paxlovid [WP] have arrived and another 500,000 may be on order - yet only 19.5k courses of Paxlovid have been prescribed. 

54M AstraZeneca, 126M Pfizer, 25M Moderna and 51M Novavax doses have been purchased www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-18/australia-covid-vaccine-surplus-options/101237430. This is 255 million doses for a population of 26 million.  Ivermectin covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/ is banned.  No health  minister or administrator - and few medical professionals - think about vitamin D or melatonin and other inexpensive, effective, well-tested early treatments. 

This is obviously corrupt - or at least strongly corrupted incompetence.  But what about the great majority of the 104k+ doctors in Australia who did not speak out about this?

Likewise twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1550595536683679744. The UK government refuses to reveal to a widow, whose husband was killed by the AstraZeneca vaccine, what information they have which would make the indemnity granted to AstraZeneca null and void.  They confirmed they have such information, but are withholding it (as the law allows them to) because:

the disclosure of that information would prejudice the commercial interests of the companies involved. 

The UK government claims:

. . . there is a strong public interest in ensuring that the commercial interests of Government and vaccine suppliers are not damaged or undermined by disclosure of information which is not common knowledge, and which could adversely impact current or future business.

Most doctors are not protesting this.  They accede to and support a regime in which they recommend and administer dangerous treatments of limited and sometimes negative value, from companies whose profitability is prioritised by the government over the health and legal rights of their patients.

Doctors were to some extent swept up in this hysteria, but they also drove it.  Doctors and immunologists (who have no clue at all about vitamin D, despite it being essential for the intracrine and paracrine signaling by which many types of immune cells individually respond to their circumstances vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/) are primarily responsible for this crime against humanity, with the attendant lockdowns, masks and millions of deaths worldwide.  Hundreds of millions are disabled by vaccine and disease injury and billions are harmed by neglect due to lockdowns and the diversion of medical attention.

Medical professionals' responsibility is to their patients and more generally the public.  The great majority of them fueled and cheered this monstrous juggernaut. They continue to do so, but the harm and limited effectiveness of the mRNA and adenovirus vector quasi-vaccines are becoming better known. I was interested to see that a recent Australian Broadcasting Corporation (100% taxpayer funded) report on COVID-19 re-infections - a nurse has had it three times this year - did not mention vaccines at all: www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-25/covid-19-reinfection-contagious-symptoms-booster-shots/101262006.

Humanity relies almost entirely on healthcare professionals for acute healthcare and advice on nutritional and lifestyle choices.  Others can do the latter, but only medical professionals have the knowledge, experience, qualifications and inclination to do the extraordinarily difficult work of acute healthcare.

How is this going to work out?

TrialSite founder Daniel O'Connor wrote:

. . . the sooner public health and other government authorities level with the American people with a transparent public health communication program the faster we can hopefully transcend this current conflict-prone situation and advance public health initiatives that can benefit all.

Indeed, but most medical professionals don't like to admit they were wrong, because they believe, largely correctly, that most people’s health depends on them being the primary, or sole, trusted source of advice regarding nutrition and medicine.

Each doctor’s career (and so income and professional identity) could be ruined by them being seen to be wrong about a significant medical decision. Even supporting a treatment or nutritional supplement not yet deemed acceptable by most doctors is enough for the self-policing mechanism to swing into action.

When such a large group of people (10M doctors in the world? 9.4M in 2014.) is so scared of contemplating that they might all have been WRONG, group-think prevails among most of them.  Collectively, most doctors are as resistant to learning something about vitamin D and other inexpensive, well-researched, approaches to improving health as waterfowl's feathers are to getting genuinely wet.

It was, and remains, medical professionals' responsibility to advise governments correctly and to resist any advice or directions governments give them which would likely damage the health of their patients or the public.

As far as I can see, only a complete, en-masse, admission of failure, followed by a restructuring of the entire field of medicine, research, academic publishing and health administration to prevent any re-occurrences, could lead to a proper resolution of the current disaster.  Such a transformation would dwarf those which put an end to doctors smoking, and which convinced them all to wash their hands after visiting the morgue, before their maternity ward rounds.

Similar transformations are needed in the minds of many people, especially those in government and mass media. We should work to bring all this about, since I see no alternative - but it could take decades.

The COVID-19 treatments highlighted in green are the safest, most effective, best researched, least expensive and easiest to obtain. None of them are patented. None of them are approved in Western countries. The best known is ivermectin, which as been successfully used in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and in other non-Western countries. See Dr Pierre Kory’s pierrekory.substack.com.

Regulatory authorities, governments and many mainstream media ignore, malign and/or dismiss these treatments In some jurisdictions, doctors can be deregistered for using or arguing for these perfectly good treatments.

The treatments highlighted in pink are those approved by the United States FDA/CDC and regulators in some or many other Western countries. These are all patented by multinational pharmaceutical companies and so are highly profitable. None of them are more effective and as safe as vitamin D (ideally in the form of calcifediol) - and most of these treatments would not be needed if everyone supplemented vitamin D3 properly, so at to attain at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

For 70 kg bodyweight without obesity, this requires about 0.125 mg 5000 IU to 0.175 mg 7000 IU vitamin D3 a day, with the desired 25-hydroxyvitamin D level being reached in 3 months or so.

Inadequate 25-hydroxyvitamin D is the most important nutritional deficiency which limits the effectiveness of immune responses. This also raises the risk of wildly dysregulated inflammatory (indiscriminate cell destroying, cytokine storm) immune responses, which drive severe COVID-19, sepsis, MIS-C, Kawasaki disease, severe influenza etc.

Almost all the vitamin D COVID-19 treatment trials used quantities of vitamin D3 which were insufficient to quickly raise circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels from typical unsupplemented levels of 5 to 25 ng/mL to safely over the 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) needed for proper immune system function. For 70 kg bodyweight, a bolus dose of 10 milligrams 400,000 IU of vitamin D3 would do this in about 4 days, due to the delays inherent in it being hydroxylated in the liver. A much better approach is a single oral dose of 1 milligram calcifediol (for 70 kg bodyweight, without obesity), which is 25-hydroxyvitamin D. This goes straight into circulation and raises the level safely over 50 ng/mL in about 4 hours. About half this was used in several trials in Cordoba, Spain, with great success: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#castillo.

Magnesium, zinc (25 to 50 mg/day), B vitamins, vitamin C and perhaps vitamin A are also common, easily correctable, nutritional deficiencies which reduce reduce immunocompetency. For information on magnesium, please see Patrick Chambers MD’s www.researchgate.net/publication/360115552_Long_Covid_Short_Magnesium.

For information on early treatments, please see c19early.com.

For the best research on vitamin D, much of it not known to most doctors, please see vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/.

For calcifediol / bolus D3 early / late COVID-19 treatment as described in the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance's MATH+ Hospital Protocol:

Nutrition Matters

Calcifediol to boost 25-hydroxyvitamin D above 50 ng/mL in 4 hours

The urgent need for at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L 25-hydroxyvitamin D (The final section was updated on 2022-02-26.) Important update 2022-03-08: The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium (Dr Paul Marik, Dr Pierre Kory, Dr Joseph Varon and colleagues) have updated the PDF version 16 of their MATH+ hospital protocol for COVID-19 to recommend a single…

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3 years ago · 18 likes · 7 comments · Robin Whittle

For a list of other Substacks concerning COVID-19 early treatment, the disastrous mRNA and adenovirus vector quasi-vaccine-centric pandemic response and systemic failures in medicine see: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/12-substacks-concerning-the-failures. One such failure is regulatory capture, such as of the FDA: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/regulatory-capture-of-the-fda .

I have not written much on the harm and death caused by the COVID-19 quasi-vaccines - mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) and adenovirus vector (AstraZeneca and J&J). Here is a list of Substacks on which you can keep up with the latest developments:

Part 1: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/12-substacks-concerning-the-failures

Part 2: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/22-substacks-concerning-the-failures

This week the United States regulators, including the captured FDA nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/regulatory-capture-of-the-fda approved the use of mRNA quasi-vaccines for babies and children aged 6 months to 5 years. The same expansion of availability and encouragement is expected in Australia in the weeks to come.

It is well known that:

• Most children in developed countries already have infection-acquired immunity to at least one of the COVID-19 variants.

• Infection-aquired immunity (depending on the original and later variants) is at least as strong and longer lasting, regarding severity of symptoms, as vaccine-induced immunity.

• The few children who suffer serious harm from COVID-19 are generally those with comorbidities such as obesity and autoimmune diseases which are in part caused by low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.

It would be well known to all doctors, if they only had the interest to find out, that:

• There are a plethora of reasons for all people (except babies substantially breast fed by vitamin D replete mothers, and those who recently have had a lot of UV-B skin exposure) to properly supplement vitamin D3 to attain, in general, 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels of 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L. (I am working on a graphic chart to make the best supplemental quantities easy to look up, based on bodyweight).

• Such 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels can reasonably be expected to offer all children a much greater degree of protection against harm from COVID-19 than whatever protection the current quasi-vaccines provide.

I could go on for pages about this. My purpose in writing today is to connect you with one doctor in particular - and then multiple doctors and airline pilots - whose earnest, concerned, well-researched rejection of these quasi vaccines is a model all doctors and health administrators should aspire to.

Please listen to this 15 minute video of United States Army Lieutenant Commander Teresa Long MD, MPH (Master of Public Health) speaking on 2021-11-02 about the harm caused to military pilots and to others by these quasi-vaccines, and her efforts to alert higher authorities in the US armed forces about this:

If only most doctors aspired to, and even roughly approached, Dr Long’s dedication to caring for her patients and more broadly for everyone, in part by researching the ugly truth of COVID-19 quasi-vaccine injury, despite extraordinary pressure not to do so.

Airline pilots surely do have senses of humour. Once, on a long-delayed flight from Dallas Fort Worth to Los Angeles, upon landing, our (White) pilot let us passengers know all about his job satisfaction. His only utterance over the PA was a slow, deep “Oh Yeah . . .” with full post-coital Barry White diction. However, they are better known for their earnestness.

A long tradition of earnestness and exactitude has made the commercial airline industry extraordinarily safe. (Several possible pilot suicides and the systemic administrative and engineering blunders with the Boeing 737-MAX are striking exceptions to a 70 year tradition of commercial airline flight safety.)

Pilots own health is now being threatened by their employers at the behest of governments, with their concerns multiplied by the hundreds of passengers who would perish with them if they slipped up on the job.

Please watch the 34 minute video in this Substack article from the Global Aviation Advocacy Coalition:

Global Aviation Advocacy Coalition

Global Aviation: Fit to Fly? (Full episode)

Watch now (34 min) | If this programme is too long for you to watch in one go (34 mins) you can watch it in pieces: Click to watch Part 1 (3 mins) Click to watch Part 2 (19 mins) Click to watch Part 3 (12 mins…

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3 years ago · 54 likes · 17 comments · Ignasz Semmelweisz

gaacoalition.substack.com/p/global-aviation-fit-to-fly

Two US Military Flight Surgeons - Dr Long and and Lt. Col. Pete Chambers MD - an independent US physician and three former Australian commercial airline Captains discuss their responses to a video statement by Kate Manderson MD (CV), Principal Medical Officer, Civil Aviation Safety Authority, Australia, who is extraordinarily dismissive of the heart damage caused by COVID-19 quasi-vaccines and likewise adamant that these quasi-vaccines are safe and effective.

Dr Manderson’s faulty understanding of the dangers and effectiveness of these quasi-vaccines strikes me as completely at odds with what we expect of a doctor with her training and responsibilities.

The MDs and pilots try to be polite, but find it impossible due to the seriousness of Dr Manderson’s statement, in the context of her setting the conditions for all commercial flight operations in Australia.

There are good people - great people - in medicine and of course flying commercial airliners day and night, gingerly putting hundreds of tonnes of aircraft down onto runways in all sorts of conditions, gently enough not to break the undercarriage and threaten the lives of all on board.

Doctors have great responsibilities too, but they are overwhelmed with information and, ideally, would know an inhumanly large amount of information about human biology, and be able to apply it all, quickly and wisely, to each of the typically dozens of patients they see every day.

Medicine and commercial airline flying are both tough jobs with awesome responsibilities. I wouldn’t want to drive buses or trucks for a living either.

In engineering, commercial flying and many other industries, most professionals attain a very high rate of success, through extensive training, tremendous cooperation, hard work and diligent avoidance of corrupting influences.

Modern medicine, including especially dentistry, has numerous spectacular achievements with drugs and other treatments. However, most doctors are clueless about nutrition - and worse still, not very interested. Corruption is rife in the form of distorted information flows and suppression of dissent from possibly faulty group agreement about the nature of health, disease, prevention and treatment.

A very high degree of incompetence and/or corruption also exists in the management and regulation of commercial airlines - as we see with companies and governments forcing pilots to accept experimental quasi-vaccines, despite the safety risks - and now a mountain of evidence of harm and death.

Everyone makes mistakes, but well-organised industries enable the whole system to work properly in almost all cases of such random errors. This is achieved through ongoing training and an assiduous battle against incompetence, complacency and systemic problems.

Everywhere money or power is exchanged constitutes fertile ground for corruption. Good countries and industries work tirelessly to prevent this - but different industries in the same country can have radically different degrees of success in minimising incompetence and corruption.

I find the doctors and pilots in these videos truly inspiring - a model of how all doctors should learn, cooperate and strive to understand the operating conditions every person needs to maximise health. This requires them to question the conclusions of their peers, and so be able to break out of the stultifying groupthink and pervasive corrupting influences, which have made too many aspects of modern medicine resemble something from the dark ages.

Hundreds of years ago it was routine to bleed people or apply mercury, in an effort to treat diseases. In the mid to late 19th century, many doctors did not think it necessary to wash their hands between visiting the morgue and the maternity wards. 80 years ago many doctors smoked tobacco without a care - images.

Future generations will look aghast at most doctors’ current ignorance of nutrition, especially regarding vitamin D and the immune system. They will struggle to understand the grinding combination of ignorance, lack of interest and corruption which caused most doctors to not only support the inadequately tested mRNA and adenovirus-vector quasi-vaccines in early 2021, but now, in mid 2022, with plenty of evidence of harm and death from these, and with widespread knowledge of their limited effectiveness, to accede to or support injecting babies and children under 5 with treatments which cause their cells to produce a spike protein which is two years out of date, and known to cause harm through a growing list of mechanisms. They don’t even bother aspirating the needle to reduce the chance of the injected fluid going straight into circulation, rather than lodging in the muscle.

If medicine was working as well as the electronics, commercial aviation or many other industries, then it would not be necessary for people in this second video to be grasping so hard for words which describe the awfulness and moral depravity of what is being enacted upon the public:

‘That woman was so poorly informed, it scares me. And she is in charge of aviation medical health - its just terrible.”

“I am absolutely shocked at the people (pilots) who are walking around, that no-one is looking at, and they have elevated D-dimers [WP indicates blood clotting], elevated troponin [WP indicates heart damage], elevated inflammatory markers and other damage that no-one is looking at. If that is not being done in the aviation community, then it is a devastating risk to the flying public. One of the things that’s so striking is the level of neurologic impairment that’s being dismissed.” - Elizabeth Lee Fliet MD.

“Completely reckless.”

“Unconscionable.”

“So cavalier.”

“Criminal. Willful indifference.”

Dr Manderson was responding “to a question from a Captain, who said ‘My daughter has been hospitalised after the booster and my son-in-law has been hospitalised after the second shot, both with myocarditis.’ So that shows you how prevalent it was.”

“The same doctors that recommended and told everyone it’s safe and effective are the doctors that these vaccine-injured people are going back to. . . . Before the vaccine came out and people had chest pain, the cardiologist, right away, ordered a cardiac MRI. Now that the vaccine is rolled out, they will order everything but a cardiac MRI - and they won’t order a troponin and they won’t order a D-dimer.” - Dr Long.

Doctors and nurses in Australia are required not to administer a vaccine if the patient’s consent was given under undue pressure, coercion or manipulation. immunisationhandbook.health.gov.au/contents/vaccination-procedures/preparing-for-vaccination#valid-consent.

At 32:00 a lawyer claims that in the USA pilots are not allowed to fly within a year of taking an experimental medication. He cites 14 CFR 61.56 but I could not find any such regulation there. Here it is:

www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/offices/aam/ame/guide/pharm/dni_dnf/

However, this is qualified as a “general” requirement, according to Flight Surgeon discretion.

Walter M. Chestnut

wmcresearch.substack.com

Vermont, USA based Walter M. Chestnut has an extensive website of medical hypotheses: wmcresearch.org. Since about March, on his Substack, he has been pursuing the hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 viral spike protein (from the virus, mRNA / adenovirus vector quasi-vaccines or I guess the actual vaccine from Novavax) causes the development of amyloid plaques/fibrils, and so does a great deal of damage. He cites many peer-reviewed research articles.

I have not evaluated this. Jessica Rose seems to support it, but Brian Mowrey has a critique. This is all good scientific exchange, at a faster pace than is possible with peer-reviewed journal articles, and with public discussions with comments.

There is a non-peer-reviewed article which seems relevant to this hypothesis:

Towards the emergence of a new form of the neurodegenerative Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: Twenty six cases of CJD declared a few days after a COVID-19 “vaccine” Jab

canadahealthalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/V2CJDPerezMoretMontagnierRIP2022REFERENCEARTICLE.pdf

by three authors:

• Jean Claude Perez PhD, whose research articles are not in peer-reviewed articles: orcid.org/0000-0001-6446-2042.

• Claire Moret-Chalmin, neurologist with no recent peer-reviewed articles (Researchgate).

• Luc Montagnier (R.I.P) [WP] Nobel Prize winning virologist, who died in February 2022

which reports on 26 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, with an average (Fig 34) 11.4 day delay in onset of symptoms after injection with a COVID-19 quasi-vaccine, mainly Pfizer but of which three were AstraZeneca.

If these observations are real, then this constitutes alarming evidence for these quasi-vaccines causing this typically fatal prion disease. I can’t evaluate the veracity of the arguments or observations. Articles such as this should not be ignored - nor assumed to be valid.

Jessica Rose

Unacceptable Jessica

Jessica's Substack Input

By Jessica Rose

jessicar.substack.com

Detailed analysis, including of statistics, with new tables and graphs, of various COVID-19 related matters, especially the Unites States VAERS vaccine adverse effects reporting system.

Jessica Rose has several biochemical qualifications (I can’t find the link, but her CV is extensive) and collaborates with other researchers in writing articles for peer-reviewed journals. She is planning on writing such an article regarding what is generally regarded as myocarditis actually being amyloidosis: jessicar.substack.com/p/i-dont-think-its-myocarditis-i-think .

In November 21 she wrote about the rising number of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease reports in VAERS (most recently, 2022-06-07: 42 reports): jessicar.substack.com/p/prion-diseases-are-no-joke. Also, 2022-06-10: jessicar.substack.com/p/rsfiedllfnkv-are-we-looking-at-weaponized.

el gato mato (bad cattitude)

bad cattitude

come for the cat. stay for the toxoplasmosis.

By el gato malo

boriquagato.substack.com

This is written by a kitten who has not yet learned to operate the Shift key - so the articles are all lower case, but with proper punctuation. Some are frivolous but enough are serious that this Substack is one of the most popular in this field.

For instance, this 2022-06-10 article:

bad cattitude

testable hypotheses on BA.4 and BA.5 covid variants

that which cannot be falsified cannot be proven. this is a simple scientific tenet and a core of the scientific method. one must always strive to disprove hypotheses. it’s the only way to know if yo…

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3 years ago · 514 likes · 198 comments · el gato malo

explores the idea (first suggested by Igor Chudov) that the most recent Omicron variants, BA.4 and BA.5, cause more severe disease in those who have been quasi-vaccinated. The argument is that these variants caused less hospitalisation in South Africa and a lot more in the UK and other northern European countries which have high levels of vaccination.

The fact that there is increasing hospitalisation in the UK, at this time of year, when 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are rising rapidly towards their late summer peak, is a real concern. See my comment regarding this.

There is a general problem with most medical doctors not thinking much or at all about vitamin D and the immune system. Despite my efforts, the same is true of almost everyone who is fussing over the COVID-19 response, quasi-vaccines etc.

I eventually did get Steve Kirsch’s attention on vitamin D, but as far as I know, he is yet to write anything about it.

I think that el gato mato’s 2020-06-20 article was where I first read about the Israeli sperm count and motility study, in which the apparently severe drop in some men was obscured by the use of median [WP] rather than average in the analysis.

Global Aviation Advocacy Coalition

Global Aviation Advocacy Coalition

Global flight safety for passengers and aviation personnel

By GAA Coalition

gaacoalition.substack.com

I will write more about this in a subsequent article. Their primary concern is vaccine injury and potential death of pilots, with obvious further dangers if they are flying commercial airliners.

Michael Capuzzo

RESCUE with Michael Capuzzo

Join me, a New York Times-bestselling author, and editor Teresa Banik Capuzzo (my wife) for the world's finest reporting on the best COVID-19 doctors and treatments, including ivermectin. Be part of the global movement to save lives and end the pandemic.

rescue.substack.com

In May 2021, Michael Capuzzo wrote a brilliant article about ivermectin, The Drug that Cracked COVID: covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/The-Drug-that-Cracked-Covid-by-Michael-Capuzzo.pdf

With his own articles and frequently those written by guests, such as Peter and Ginger Breggin, he continues this great work, regarding vaccine injury and the corruption of medicine: rescue.substack.com/p/the-global-kidnapping-of-american and rescue.substack.com/p/covid-rivals-all-the-horrors-of-history

There are no-doubt other such websites - please mention them in the Comments below.

There’s more to Substack than COVID-19 etc. Here are some other Substacks which you may find interesting:

I really value the analysis and reporting of social and political matters by Matt Taibbi taibbi.substack.com. In 2010 he described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. He recently described a journalist as a “humorously dependable wrongness-barnacle”. So who we gonna call when we need a name for the great morass of incompetence, corruption and at times vandalistic action or inaction which has got much of Medicine in its grip?

Bari Weiss and her guests write what I regard as good commentary and reporting on social and political matters. Her Substack has its own domain name: www.commonsense.news.

If you get frustrated - as Tina and I often do - with the general lack of nuance in the world today, you may find Mary Gaitskill’s Out of It Substack marygaitskill.substack.com a place to reflect and connect.

Modern Discontent

Modern Discontent

Publishing Independent Science Papers on COVID-19 and Occasional Opinion Pieces about Science and Culture. Be evidence driven not narrative driven.

moderndiscontent.substack.com

Patient, timely, detailed and thoughtful analysis of the most pertinent biochemical questions of the day.

Steve Kirsch

Steve Kirsch's newsletter

I write about COVID vaccine safety and efficacy, corruption, censorship, mandates, masking, and early treatments. America is being misled by formerly trusted authorities.

stevekirsch.substack.com

Steve funded research into early treatments for COVID-19 starting in early 2020. This lead to establishing that the SSRI [WP] fluvoxamine [WP] is an effective early treatment. Despite continuing efforts, this has not been widely accepted or used.

He later devoted his extraordinary efforts to the questionable effectiveness of the COVID-19 mRNA and adenovirus-vector quasi-vaccines and to the the harm and deaths they cause. This is a busy Substack with multiple posts a day.

2022-06-29 update: Steve received an anonymous Word file with links to over 400 articles on COVID-19 quasi-vaccine adverse effects, which are listed in this 2022-05-28 article:

Steve Kirsch's newsletter

Vaccine adverse reaction articles

Note: I didn’t compile this. Someone else did, but I don’t know who did because they didn’t put their name on the Word file presumably because they wanted to remain anonymous. Neuro: General Neuro side effects: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ane.13451?fbclid=IwAR1CemFwLUpsMK19GMZa_xPF775Q4B0IiksbrziKUpIrRXhYR5cDQFFfVAQ…

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3 years ago · 55 likes · 18 comments · Steve Kirsch

Pierre Kory MD

Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings

Exploring the dysfunction in American medicine & the effects of the captured health agencies' relentless war on generic drugs.

By Pierre Kory, MD, MPA

pierrekory.substack.com

Dr Kory is, with Dr Paul Marik and Dr Joseph Varon and others, a founding member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, who pioneer early and hospital treatment for COVID-19 and who now also recommend vitamin D3 supplementation quantities as a ratio of bodyweight and the use of calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D) for 4 hour repletion of 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. I am working on an article about the bodyweight ratio vitamin D arrangements. See nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/calcifediol-to-boost-25-hydroxyvitamin regarding calcifediol.

Dr Kory has a special interest in ivermectin, the campaign against it, and is especially angry about the all too pervasive corruption of medicine.

See his list from c19early.com of COVID-19 early treatments, with the officially approved ones highlighted. Every officially highlighted one is extremely expensive, yet others which are better researched, more effective and less expensive are not officially approved: pierrekory.substack.com/p/how-i-lost-three-icu-jobs-during .

Robert Malone PhD

rwmalonemd.substack.com

mRNA pioneer Robert Malone MD is a leading figure in the campaign to raise awareness about the failures of the official COVID-19 response, especially the mRNA quasi-vaccines.

Mathew Crawford

Rounding the Earth Newsletter

Pandemic, Bitcoin, education, finance, economics, statistics, and other topics that need attention.

By Mathew Crawford

roundingtheearth.substack.com Mathew Crawford specialises in careful statistical analysis of complex situations, such as regarding the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines: roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/confirmation-of-the-efficacy-illusion.

Alex Berenson

Unreported Truths

Independent, citizen-funded journalism

By Alex Berenson

alexberenson.substack.com

Journalist Alex Berenson has long been on the case of the failed response to the pandemic and the problems with the quasi-vaccines, such as the paucity of data supporting Pfizer’s request for its quasi-vaccines to be used on children aged 6 months to 5 years.

The Naked Emperor

nakedemperor.substack.com

All matters COVID, indeed - such as this article about recent Israeli research which shows that, contrary to what many doctors believe, unvaccinated people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 are not more likely to suffer myocarditis and pericarditis than those who were unvaccinated and uninfected. Also, frequent articles with a roundup of recent items of interest.

Eugyppius

eugyppius: a plague chronicle

We are witnessing an unprecedented, comprehensive failure of policy, medicine and science. The world will never be the same.

www.eugyppius.com

Thoughtful analysis by a pseudonymous doctor in Germany.

A Mid-Western doctor

amidwesterndoctor.substack.com

Anonymous doctor in the USA writes about corruption in medicine. This is one of the long articles on this topic which I have not yet finished reading. Also an article on the COVID-19 vaccine adverse events he has personally encountered.

Aaron Kheriaty MD

Human Flourishing

Welcome to my writings on bioethics, health policy, and society. I regularly post updates here on my legal efforts to oppose coercive medical mandates and advocate for transparency from public health agencies.

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD

aaronkheriaty.substack.com

Dr Kheriaty has 162k Twitter followers. A recent article aaronkheriaty.substack.com/p/punishing-dissident-physicians discusses the proposed Californian legislation which would enable doctors to be deregistered if they were found to have disseminated information related to COVID-19 (and so treatments, including the quasi-vaccines and the actual vaccines such as that of Novavax) which was judged to be “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus to an extent where its dissemination constitutes gross negligence by the licensee.”

Igor Chudov

Igor’s Newsletter

Independent thoughts

By Igor Chudov

igorchudov.substack.com

Igor, originally from Russia, has no more formal qualifications to write about medical matters than I do. He is based near Chicago, runs a mathematics website www.algebra.com builds mechanical contrivances and moves heavy machinery for a living. This is a particularly interesting article:

Igor’s Newsletter

Vaccine-Induced Tolerance to Spike Protein ...

In the last section of my post from yesterday, I asked, why doesn’t Paxlovid work for vaccinated people. Try to stop and think for a minute. Ask yourself a question: why, exactly, is Paxlovid not working in the vaccinated? The problem is not with Paxlovid, it is the same medication as given to the unvaccinated. The problem is with the immune systems of th…

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3 years ago · 323 likes · 353 comments · Igor Chudov

Igor discusses a hypothesis from late 2021 that because the mRNA and adenovirus-vector COVID-19 quasi-vaccines cause our own cells to produce viral spike proteins attached to their cell membranes, pointing outwards, that the immune system instead of responding to the epitopes [WP] it finds on the spike proteins as if they were on a pathogen (such as a bacterial or fungal cell, or a virus), leads to a response which more one of immunotolerance, which is intended to protect our own cells from undesirable immune system attack.

Brian Mowrey

Unglossed

Science, Politics, the Covid "Vaccines," Other. Est. June 2021.

By Brian Mowrey

unglossed.substack.com

One of the many articles / videos I want to read / listen to properly is this one:

Unglossed

It's Probably Not an Alzheimer's Virus

Housekeeping: It seems likely my “week” out of the office will sprawl into a summer-long semi-hiatus. San Diego is open again, for another month or two at least. So I am enjoying the return of practical labor, free-wheeling conversation with strangers, and an income…

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3 years ago · 33 likes · 33 comments · Brian Mowrey

concerning an interview with Professor Rudy Tanzi. As best I understand it so far, there is a series of articles, mentioned in part 2, about the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein triggering the formation of amyloids (WP undesirable agglomerations of proteins), which are somewhat related to prions (WP misfolded proteins which can catalyse the misfolding of other proteins of the same type). Prof. Tanzi apparently argues that amyloid is not necessarily pathogenic: that “oligomerization and fibril formation - are in fact an intrinsic feature of antimicrobial peptides in general. They are how the innate immune system ‘does the work’ of limiting the movement of microbes.” So this is a critique of the material by Walter M. Chestnut and others regarding COVID-19, quasi-vaccines and amyloid diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (~AKA mad cow disease)

Continued in part 2: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/22-substacks-concerning-the-failures.