Vitamin D, Covid-19, and the Promise of Immortality

Why vitamin D probably won’t reduce your risk of death to 0%

Pictured: Stock photo results for “vitamins”. Some herbs, some pills, what’s not to love! Source: Pexels

Vitamin D is pretty contentious. If you’ve ever written about the glorious sun vitamin before, you’ll know that people are strangely passionate about it to an extent that you’ll rarely see in any arena other than sports. It’s been proposed as a cure for everything from heart disease to cancer, and we’ve run more studies on D than almost any other supplement you’d find in the second most expensive aisle of a supermarket.

The most expensive, of course, being cheese. Unlike cheese, however, supplements are rarely as brilliant as claimed. Source: Pexels

People have been claiming that vitamin D is an effective treatment for Covid throughout the pandemic, based on a succession of poor-quality, biased, and sometimes even fraudulent research papers. Unfortunately, the best-quality evidence has generally not found large benefits for supplementing vitamin D, although there aren’t many good trials so it’s hard to say either way if it works.

Recently, however, the idea that vitamin D could reduce your risk of Covid-19 death to 0% has been going viral online, which is quite odd to see. Rigorous randomized trials have thus far largely failed to find a mortality benefit for the…