COVID and Vitamin C - Any Updates?

Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. This is a show about opening up the often mysterious world of how doctors think. The goal, to empower the listener to gain access to the best healthcare possible. Good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me. I'm Dr. Paul. And hydration is very important when you talk for a living. So I should do a lot of that. But today's program is about, uh, it's an update about things we talked a lot about, both on this program, uh, a whole lot of podcasts and interviews and TV shows and things, uh, all around the world. Um, and some physician trainings. So it's been a real popular topic and I've gotten a lot of requests for from the public side of things to do an update. And that is, what's going on, or is anything going on with respect to vitamin C and COVID? And is there any, you know, newer research coming out? What are people doing? What are you seeing with patients in hospitals, etc.? So I thought, well, this is a really good time to do the update because there's a lot of other, you know, there's a lot of other things going on right now in the world of COVID And the, the world of nutrients and COVID, as far as, you know, being either supportive, protective, or whatever, and a number of other things are written about a lot. You see a lot more podcasts about that. And I think that that's a good thing. As I usually say, you know, those things are so much of a predicate to the way that our body works and our immune system works. It's, it's kind of dumb not to include that. Will they guarantee that you don't, you know, get COVID or you don't have a bad time with it? No, but probably they would decrease a lot of the trouble. And there's, for those who haven't seen it, I have a newsletter that you can get. And I have, I do research summaries usually on the newsletter. And one of them is called COVID and Nutrients. And then there's COVID and Genetics, which is another very interesting thing that's— One of the reasons I believe that we see a lot of variety in the, the type of pathology people develop with COVID and that is an important topic as well. We certainly don't know a ton about it, but we, we know more than I thought when I started to do the research review. So because early on there was a lot of physician training that I was doing around vitamin C and COVID and a lot of writing. I've done some, posted a lot of things on social media about it. And because of my background in working with vitamin C and even working with vitamin C in human research in the past, I, we believe that's why I keep getting asked to share things about it. So what I wanted to do today is for as broad an audience as possible. So I realize some healthcare professionals and even scientists listen to me sometimes, but the majority of the population that listen are, are the general public who, you know, may not be scientists, which is great. So what I'm going to do is go through some key things that I think would be good for an update. Because we're going on, you know, any, any large number of months at this point. 2020 where there's been a lot of dribbling out of information and stuff, and people are getting, you know, little bits and drabs here and there. So I want to go through the most important things I think that an update around COVID and vitamin C would include. I want to share first, why do we think vitamin C would make a difference? And that's more from the physiological, the biochemical part of your body. And, you know, why would that be different? I want to talk because I got a lot of questions about this, about what the difference is between taking it by mouth or getting an IV like some of the hospital protocols are. I want to talk about patients that I've interacted with. So because of a lot of the interviews I've done, etc. I occasionally, but more and more as time goes on, more frequently will get calls from other doctors, usually who are at a hospital and are considering, you know, the family may be asking for it, or the patient, or they may— they just may be considering the addition of vitamin C IV to their COVID patient. And so we'll discuss, you know, how to do that. I wrote a publication just for hospitals so that they have that. So I want to talk about patient experiences when we have in North America gotten it into a hospital. The other thing I want to talk about a little bit is a particular study that is in the process. It's done being written, the patients are done being assessed, and it's in the process of peer review, which we'll talk about in a moment. And I want to talk about some of the outcomes of that study, even though we don't quite have it in the public domain as a peer-reviewed study yet, but we have the early raw data. So I want to end with that. That's actually quite good and interesting information, and it illustrates some of the concepts that we're going to talk about here. But what I'd like to do is to start with, you know, I just read an update. It was a news story from— well, it was just posted yesterday, so I don't remember actually who it was from. I read it at 3 o'clock this morning, so I remember the details, and it was a story where they had a COVID patient who developed sepsis, which is a systemic inflammatory infectious problem that can kill you very quickly in some cases. So it's a big bad problem. And there are, there are studies using IV vitamin C plus some other things, or with or without, in septic patients. And so something triggered the doctors in the hospital to give this a try, IV vitamin C. And they gave a, what they considered a robust dose, which was 30 grams, 30,000 milligrams IV, which is a— Good dose. It's certainly, as is said in the paper we're going to look at later, it's lower than we often give cancer patients. It's very safe. And the result was so remarkable, the patient kind of turning the corner and coming out of their septic state, that the other doctor in the hospital system they were collaborating with didn't actually believe that it happened and had to go over and visit and actually get their eyes on the case and see that it It happened. Now, the reason I bring that up is that's, you know, that particular experience and what they're doing with that's probably going to lead to some other good research and stuff, but it illustrates what I've been seeing with people when I talk to hospital staff and families. And we see patients getting vitamin C at different stages of COVID especially if they're in the hospital, and we often see things improve and sometimes really remarkable turnarounds. So when I read the story, it was just, it was very confirmatory because it's exactly what I keep seeing. The problem is, and this is a, I put out a thing of what people wanted, you know, on the radio today, and this was one of the most popular things I got back. But one of the questions was, well, why don't they just use vitamin C in the hospital more? Well, I want to talk about that when we get to this study that's coming up because there's, Whether they're, you know, reasonable or not, the way hospitals work, especially in North America, there are barriers to new treatments going in. And as we know, there's a lot of experimental treatments that are going in faster, and vitamin C has been around a long time. It's certainly been written about in sepsis and other instances, but it's not really— it's, it's not making its entry into the hospital system as rapidly as some of the other treatments. So I want to go through why that might be. But why would we think of vitamin C? Well, just to recap a couple of the high points, and there's some older podcasts— older meaning in 2020— where we go into this, so you can look back on your pod burner and see those. But vitamin C, most animals, most mammals make their own vitamin C. Okay, and so, uh, if they're getting sick or stressed or whatever, their body will go into an increase of manufacture of vitamin C. That's really cool. That's a great thing. Humans can do this with other nutrient, uh, things that we use in our body, but vitamin C, we, we adapted over time to not have the enzyme to do that. So that means that humans are Unique. We're not the only mammal, but just about, uh, in that we need to eat our vitamin C and get it into our bodies that way. We can't make it ourselves. Well, the next question is, is vitamin C necessary for life? Yes. If we totally run out of vitamin C, we'll have other problems go on beyond— we know about scurvy, but other problems will go along, and we will, uh, eventually die from any number of problems. And that has happened in the past. So what does vitamin C do that would relate to COVID and the pathology of COVID Well, at the base of COVID or any other inflammatory infectious process, your body is trying to deal with the infection and the inflammatory immune process that goes on. And if you get a disease like COVID that can trigger a lot of the inflammatory processes to go out of balance, what you will see is Is that the body's natural response to the inflammatory shifts has to kind of rise to the occasion and then calm down. Well, one of the things that's very important at the ground floor with this response is a 3-part system that works in your cells and in the fluids around your cells and inside your cells, actually. And it depends on the area. Okay. But the 3 parts are glutathione, which largely protects the inside of cells from this inflammatory activity. Then there's vitamin C, which protects the, the watery areas, so both outside and inside the cell and in the plasma. And then there is vitamin E family called the tocopherols, and they're fat soluble, and so they protect the cell membranes. So when you have these 3 working together, it's not just that they individually do their job, they're synergistic. They're synergistic. Synergistic in that if, for example, vitamin E encounters an inflammatory radical, it will turn into an oxidized form of its vitamin state, and it can't do that again until it's recycled and reduced. Vitamin C will come along and reduce the vitamin E, so it actually backs up the vitamin E. Vitamin C and glutathione do the same thing in the water-soluble areas. Okay. Reason that's so important is if the 3 are working together, we have the ability to ebb and flow with the inflammatory process and we get less things like cytokine storms, we get less clotting. We hear with COVID about abnormal clotting. We get less of a bunch of other things if that process works. Well, who is nutritionally the weak link in there? Usually it's vitamin C. And so glutathione, our body can make glutathione from other amino acids. It's 3 amino acids put together. So glutathione can be resynthesized by the body. Vitamin E, we have to eat in foods. And people say, well, why is vitamin E not the weak member? Vitamin E is necessary, but not that much is necessary. Right. Because it's fat soluble and fat soluble vitamins stay in your body a long time. Okay, but vitamin C is water soluble, meaning under normal circumstances, most of what you eat today or take today leaves your body today. So you have to renew that source every day. That's why it's the weak link. And since we don't make it ourselves, if it was like glutathione where we could make it ourselves, we could probably have some backup, but we don't have any backup. Now, why do sick people tend to need more vitamin C than they could eat? The reason is that the food that we eat and the vitamin C we get in on our food is usually enough to kind of keep us going if we're eating a diet that has vitamin C sources in it. And with people, you know, will ask what that is. You can go online and USDA and everybody else has charts about what vitamins are in what foods. So you can see vitamin C is in a lot of foods, way more than oranges and stuff, so take a look. But if you're sick, what happens is imagine when I'm well, this 3-part system is kind of humming along and doing its thing, doesn't require a lot of input. When I get sick and I get these cytokines, we hear about cytokine storms and stuff, those are inflammatory pro and anti-inflammatory chemicals that are used by the immune system. Well, when I get sick and I'm dumping a lot of those out, I'm going to be kind of beating up the membranes of my cells, and there's going to be more oxidation in the body, and I'm going to burn up this little 3-part system. And because vitamin C is the weak link, it's going to go first. So I have to put more in. And we literally see this with people. There's a publication in 1981 by Dr. Robert Cathcart, who is a mentor of mine, and he's passed away a while ago now, but he was, he was one of the real pioneers, especially in high doses of vitamin C. And he wrote a paper about what he called the bowel tolerance method of vitamin C administration orally. So this gets to our next point, which is IV versus oral. And he would say, you know, that— and this is what we've seen since then— healthy people, you know, don't need a ton of vitamin C. The statistics and the biochemistry is usually in the hundreds of milligrams. But when we get sick, we can start to need more. And this matches what the other mammals do. When they get sick, they make more. We can't make more. So he, and I've done this with people, would give people more and more and more vitamin C when they're getting a flu or a cold or some other thing. And they would be able to take it without getting diarrhea. Diarrhea is the normal side effect of too much vitamin C. And so you would give them doses through the day, dose, you know, 3, 4, 5 times through the day and have them increase the dose until their bowels got loose. And then you back off a little bit. And that was the saturation point for their body, way higher than what we're told in nutrition class that the body needs. And as soon as they start getting better, their tolerance goes down and it means the body doesn't need that much anymore. So the first thing about IV versus oral is oral, you need to go up and down in your dosing, but when you're sick, your need is higher. Now, one of the things that they did early on in China, and we'll talk about the Chinese experience a bit here, Is, um, they realized that they only had so much hospital resources. They want to keep people out of the hospital as much as possible. Well, so what they did, uh, was they got, um, you know, tons literally of vitamin C powder, and they got it out to the public and told them to take it through the day just as a helpful preventive so that if they got a milder case, this may be helpful. Now, is that going to prevent COVID or is it going to, you know, stop all the bad COVID or whatever? No, but it's going to help more than not doing it because this is truly the weak link in your immunologic response, at least at the ground floor, the vitamin C problem. IV in China, they reserve for hospital because people obviously need to go to the hospital, might be on ventilators, might be in the ICU, etc. They're really sick and they're going to be even lower. And there's actually research now and research prior on septic patients where— and trauma patients where we see that their vitamin C levels— normally our levels are low. Vitamin C levels in a trauma or a septic patient are even lower, sometimes nonexistent. And so obviously you need to put some back in. So in most hospitals outside of North America, if they're going to use vitamin C for a hospitalized patient, they'll put it on a particular type of slow drip that's going all the time and the patient gets the benefit of it. Okay, and so that's a plus. So IV can go in without giving you the digestive upset. And so for example, you might be able, if you're really sick, you might be able to take, you know, 8,000 milligrams or 12,000 milligrams throughout the day of vitamin C. Again, this is not medical advice, it's just an example, but you might be able to go really high. But if I give you, you know, 50,000 milligrams, 50 grams, And you took that, you'd get a lot of diarrhea. It wouldn't really hurt you, but you get a lot of diarrhea. But I can put 50,000 milligrams or 50 grams into an IV and you'll have no digestive problems at all, and your cells will get all the benefit of the vitamin C. So IV is good for certain things, oral is good for certain things, and what we need to remember is oral absorption when we're sick increases, and there's some— there's research around that. So the next thing before we get to this new research that's percolating in the research system that I wanted to talk about were patient experiences. And I've had a, I believe, a broad group of patient experiences, COVID patients. And I'm also connected with other doctors who are involved in managing or treating or Otherwise interacting with COVID patients. And so the group that, that, you know, when we kind of put out a question to the group or whatever of doctors, we have a lot of what we call data points to look at. And so we can start to see trends when it's more than just, you know, my experience or, you know, Dr. X's experience out there. And so some of the trends that we're seeing and some of the things I have personally seen that I think are important now, Is this available to everybody? No, sadly it's not. But if we don't talk about it, and if we don't get it out there in the, you know, out into the world and into the ether and let people talk about it, it never will be available to people. But I need to share what the experiences are. So the first thing is that I have had patients where they have a very obvious viremia where they've got a high fever, cough, all of this stuff, very similar to influenza A symptoms, very sick, and they turn out to test positive for COVID. And in some cases, we're able to get them to get a high-dose vitamin C really early on. Now, what we've seen with influenza and other infections, especially viral, is if we can do a higher dose early on and their labs are stable and they, you know, there's no lab reason why you can't do it because you checked all that, a lot of people will have a shorter duration of their viremia. So they'll be sick a shorter amount of time. They'll still have a good immune response, but they'll be sick a shorter amount of time. And so in people where they have a very big viral response, which is great, you know, for your immune system, so fever, You know, aches, pains, tiredness, cough, all that stuff. If we get them a higher dose early on between, say, 25 and 75 grams, which is 25,000 to 75,000 milligrams, and gets given over a shorter amount of time, then what you'll see often is that they will start to improve faster than other people with that level of viremia. Now, if they can get more than one, it's usually better. But one of the interesting things, this is a small number of people, you know, and if we look at the group I'm involved with that does these things, you know, the numbers are probably in the hundreds, but it's still a small number of people. In most all cases, none of those people progressed to the point where they had to go to the hospital. And what a lot of them did was they got the IV in the early part, and then they started to take oral vitamin C. Okay. throughout the day to bowel tolerance. And, uh, they were able to work through the viremia without needing to go to the hospital, which is really the best thing if you do get infected. Now that's one group of people. Another group of people that I've had would contact me and say, you know, I'm, you know, I tested positive. I've lost my sense of taste. I've, you know, they've got some classic symptoms. And usually what I feel, although there's A lot of controversy around testing and things is if the person has classic symptoms, especially hallmark symptoms like loss of smell or taste or something, and they have a viremia and their test is positive, I usually— the presence of the signs and symptoms and the tests go together, and we can assume that's probably true positive because there are some false positives and false negatives. But in those cases, a lot of those people have, you know, not had super high fever, really, really sick viremia, and they They called early on when they got their test results, but they weren't that sick, and they didn't want to get sick or go to the hospital. Now, what's interesting is most of the people I'm talking about here are in what we would consider a higher risk group, being 60+ years old, in, you know, some of the comorbidities we're going to talk about, etc. And so, you know, You really have to be, you know, cautious and make sure people are, you know, getting better and not needing to go to the hospital. But all of those folks started and they did a lot of the nutritional support things, like I wrote about in the newsletter and oral vitamin C. And there's a whole group of those that didn't have the big IV thing and the big fever and all that. The people without fever that were just sort of low and slow, but they were definitely positive. They did the nutrient things and all that stuff. And many of them, you know, had about a week to 2 weeks where they felt pretty bad, maybe had a cough for 3 or 4 weeks, but they got over it, which was very, very positive. And got through it with not needing a hospital, but also not being extremely sick like the first group of people I talked about. Now I want to say, because I talked to enough people, that there are what we'd call outliers, where They may actually— I've got some people I know very well who are younger than the 60-year-old group, technically should have a better time of it and are doing all the right stuff nutritionally and, you know, all the things. And yet they have a longer experience with the disease and they develop post-COVID syndrome and all this stuff. We did a podcast about post-COVID if you want to go back and look at that. And talks about all the many things that can go wrong there. In the second group, actually the first and the second group where they got early intervention, most of the people didn't have any post-COVID. It was very remarkable. Some do though. I just want to point that out. This is not 100%. It never is with humans. And then there's the group of people that sort of lead us into this study that I want to talk about, and those are people who are hospitalized. Now, early on, when I was asked to, in the very beginning of the US experience with COVID to put together an update for physicians and healthcare people about IV vitamin C and a little bit of oral stuff, but IV vitamin C and COVID specifically, I had to rely on a couple of things. One was my experience of many years doing this with cancer patients and other infections. The other was the of people using intravenous vitamin C in the cases of sepsis, non-COVID sepsis, because again, we were early in the pandemic. And then the other thing I had to rely on was where in the world have they had COVID longer, and what are the doctors there doing? And that happened to be China. So as I've said before in some of the older podcasts, you can go back and look, I was able to get into the Wuhan hospital system database and their research system. And then what I did is I took the research that they were using about vitamin C with their patients directly. And it was in Mandarin Chinese, and I do not speak Mandarin. I have— I wrote a book that is in Mandarin, but I didn't write the Mandarin part, but I had it translated to English so I could read it. Yeah. Read through and was seeing again early results with, you know, 50, 60, 70 people, but still people who were dying. And we started to see, wow, if you do the vitamin C in the hospital in an IV, it seems to help pull people out of the death spiral, et cetera. So what I did was just reported all that data because physicians can make up their own minds. But then I was asked to take and collate that data and my experience with IV vitamin C into a publication for hospitals specifically. And originally I was actually asked to do that by a couple of states in the US Department of Health. They were considering making it a statewide mandate to do IV vitamin C. Now that never materialized, but it led to the publication of this paper, which essentially goes through how in a hospital can you add vitamin C IV into a patient who's, you know, in the ICU, maybe on a ventilator, getting all these other drugs, not mess up the other treatments and still help the patient. And one of the problems when you get to, well, why aren't they using more vitamin C, you know, in hospitals or whatever? And they do in other countries. There are hospitals I'm associated with in other countries, and IV vitamin C is used all the time in those. It's just not a North American thing. So One of the problems is it can be something kind of simple like vitamin C, but it's new and you already have a patient on 11 other drugs and a ventilator. And as the doctor running that patient's case in the hospital, they don't want to throw in something new they've never used before. And it makes sense. I understand it. I just yesterday or the day before had a long conversation with a hospital doctor about this and, you know, working on trying to break through, you know, that. The other thing is that the hospital pharmacy has to procure the vitamin C and they don't carry it, you know, so if you need it, it might take a little— it doesn't take that long, but because they use it in research in hospitals, but still, they're not used to that, so we try and help them with that. So the publication though, basically, having worked in enough hospitals, I said, Let's make it as simple as possible. Let's match the data, the early data from China in the hospitals that actually used it with patients. And so we have sort of a seamless, you know, protocol from, you know, one to the other. And let's get it out there to the hospital. So it's in a lot of hospitals, more and more using it, but it's still a minority in North America. It's more in other countries. So one of the things though that was interesting also, once I got some of the translating done with the Mandarin from the Chinese experience, was there were outlier cases where most people were doing— most of the doctors in the ICUs were doing this protocol I'm going to talk about with the new research, just very new. But there were some times where people were crashing, and so they would do a higher dose of IV vitamin C, kind of like I said what I was doing with the people who had high fevers and they just got diagnosed. Yeah. And they would do this with people where nothing was working and they were going to die on the ventilator. And so they would, instead of giving them a low and slow vitamin C, they would give them a 50-gram vitamin C in 2 hours, which is kind of common with cancer patients, for example. And in, in these case reports, they would miraculously see people, you know, come out of their crash biologically, get off the ventilator and go home. It was very similar, not exactly the same, but very similar to that news report I said I read at 3 o'clock this morning about the 30-gram IV vitamin C they did with a person who was not doing well with their sepsis. So that's— and I just want to make that point that while this protocol I'm going to talk about in the research and the one that the main protocol they were using in China and the one I published here in the United States are real similar, they're exactly the same. There are times when higher doses might be necessary. So that is an important thing to keep in mind. But generally speaking, the idea of the publication that I did based on my experience and the Chinese experience, and then that being used in hospitals in North America, it's caught on a little bit. We're hoping to have it catch on more. And the barriers to getting, you know, it happening in the hospital really are logistical. It's— people aren't used to this. It's not on the menu normally, and you kind of have to push to get it done. In fact, there's cases where— I won't say what state, but in the United States, there was a case of a foreign-born person who happened to have a lot of medical people in their family in their country of origin. And they were around 80, and they got COVID, and they were in the hospital, and The foreign-born medical doctors said you should really be getting IV vitamin C. The hospital didn't want to do it, and one of the family members in the United States happened to be an attorney, and they went and they threatened to sue the hospital for obstructing care or something of that nature, and they were able to get it done, and the person lived even at 80 and got out of the hospital. So it's happening. It's just There's a lot of barriers to it in North America. And in 2 weeks, I'm going to be on a podcast interview with some physicians in Canada. We're going to talk about how it's going in Canada, but it's not a whole lot better really. So what I want to do in the second half here is take the basics that we went through and say, has anyone actually studied it in America or anywhere else in the world? Well, it's not— it's been vitamin C as an IV additive has been studied in America in a number of trials around sepsis. Not as much, you know, at least that's published right now around COVID complications. We have what I've been talking about. But in China, they took and did a randomized controlled trial, which is the trial design of choice when you're trying to look at a particular intervention, especially if it's one intervention. And what that means is they have criteria for the patients coming in. So in this case, they were patients who were being hospitalized for COVID. And what happens then is you are randomized literally by numbers instead of your name, and you're either going to go in and you're going to get IV vitamin C as part of your IV cocktail, or you're going to get a placebo as part of your cocktail. And you don't know which is going on. So the randomized control part, as long as you have good criteria up at the top as far as who's going into the trial, then attempts to even out things that, that may otherwise show up that are artifacts in trials as far as statistics go. Now, another really important thing, and this is something that comes up a lot in conversations with hospital doctors in North America, is Well, we don't know how vitamin C is going to interact with all these other drugs we have the patient on. And what's important about that statement is they don't know because it's not part of what they do in their normal practice of intensive care, etc., but it is known. Okay, so it's not— we don't know doesn't mean nobody knows, right? But if you have a patient there, you know, like the conversation I had a day ago with the ICU doctor, and the patient's, you know, prone and on a ventilator, and there's all these other things going on, you don't have time to sit down and kind of sort all of this stuff out. And, you know, is it safe or not? Now, I will say just a quick little footnote. The ICU doctor I talked to about a day ago, whenever it was, was familiar with vitamin C in COVID. And he says, well, my protocol in the hospital is I give them oral Vitamin C and zinc, and we talked about zinc and why that's important. He says, so it's in their orders and they're getting it in their feeding tube, you know, so it's going in. And he says, you know, I've had no problem with that because, as he says, well, it can't hurt and it might help. So he says, you know, he says, I'm not against vitamin C, but there's a concern about what am I going to do if I put this intravenous substance in and I'm giving them other intravenous drugs? Well, the first thing that I tried to point out in the original paper I wrote and the experience from the Chinese ICU doctors, but we have to keep saying, is they did the IV vitamin C early on in their, in their experience, which the people who got IV vitamin C all actually lived, which was amazing for ICU patients with COVID They put it right in And they gave it right alongside all of the other normal ICU drugs. They basically are doing very similar ICU drugs to what we do, okay? Never an interaction. There won't be because vitamin C is water-soluble, but also the dose is low and slow through the day, so it's not a big giant pharmacodynamic effect where you have a big— To one drug and your other drugs fighting chemically. That just doesn't happen the way it's done. done. So all the normal drugs were given, but they're randomized to a placebo or vitamin C. And the other thing that they did was it's exact same protocol as the, what I call the median protocol from China, the most common one in China. It's the one that I published for hospitals here in North America. Really any country could use it, but it was intended for us. And, and so it's all the same protocol. And then they did a study based on this same protocol, which is 1,000 milligrams, a gram of vitamin C intravenously given throughout the 24-hour period every day. Now, people who do IV vitamin C for cancer and have patients in the, in the office for 2 or 3 hours might give, you know, 50,000 or more milligrams, 100,000 milligrams in 2 or 3 or 4 hours. And so they look at it and say, well, that's almost no vitamin C. Well, It's a different purpose you're trying to get at. And what we're really trying to do here is you want the vitamin C going in because remember it's water soluble and we, you know, we pee out what we don't need today. And also remember, counterpoint to that is when we're sick we need more, and COVID patient in the hospital is very sick. So what we prefer for the average patient with COVID is that they get it all the time throughout the day. And so that feeds that little system of the 3 parts with the glutathione, the vitamin C, and the tocopherols, the vitamin E family, and it never lets it run out of gas. So it makes sense biologically and pharmacologically. Sure, you could give more, but, you know, this is what they did. They did it for 7 days. Now, one thing I will say is what I have seen, uh, in, in anywhere I've had contact with patients who've been able to do IV vitamin C with COVID in the hospital is earlier is better to start. So you don't want to like wait, and in the study they had entry criteria and there's, you know, there's a lag time. So waiting is not good, but for a study that's sort of, you know, not as practical. The other thing is in the earlier Chinese interventions they did the vitamin C, you know, 24 hours a day on a pump, slow drip, and they did it till the person was discharged from the hospital. And I think from what I see, that's better. But 7 days— with a study, you have to pick your battles, and you have to pick finite amounts of time. Now, the things to, you know, keep in mind— almost all the patients who got the The drug, the vitamin C part, got it at 7 days. There were a couple people that were a little bit shorter. The people with placebo got the placebo every day, so there was really no difference as far as what was going into them. The average person had a lag time between getting their symptoms of COVID and getting their vitamin C of 17 days. Now, part of that's out of the hospital. Yeah. But as I said, ideally, you know, in a perfect world, which we don't live in, but we can talk about it, the day that you need to go into the hospital would be the day that I would start the IV, and the day you leave the hospital would be when I would take the IV out. But as I say, for this study, that's not what they did. Now, in the discussion about this paper, this study, you know, they said, well, there might be some problems as far as, you know, some of the data because And then they went into the demographics of the people who were in the study. And it's not just the people that their criteria said we're going to put in the study. It's the, the people who were actually there, who they were able to enter into the study. And the interesting thing is, is if you're going to try and prove that something worked in COVID patients in the hospital, what they see as skewed information actually probably is good information because the average age was close to 70 years old. 67-year-old average, which is certainly in, you know, every year or every decade after 50, you have a rise in mortality, et cetera. So 67 is an older crowd and 2/3 were male. Well, males tend, especially when they hit the hospital, to have a worse time. So one of the things that I looked at that and says, well, this is a tough crowd. Like if you have people close to 70 and 2/3 are males, you have more more likelihood that they're going to have a bad time in the hospital. And so an intervention ought to be able to show itself there. The other thing was that they had about 30% plus or minus of some of the big comorbidities, high blood pressure, diabetes, and then other cardiovascular disease. And a lot of people have those all together. But about a third of these people had comorbidities, which kicks up again your likelihood of a bad time or dying during your hospital stay. So what happened in this was they started looking at, you know, you don't know going into a study usually what markers to look at. Normally you pick one marker because it's something you can measure and you think theoretically that, you know, the drug or the vitamin C in this case is going to help out with that marker. Well, so they chose a particular marker which was kind of hard to do statistically with that group, and it was how many days are they on mechanical ventilation, so literal ventilator time. They were not able to get a signal statistically. So the statistics of the numbers of people who did and didn't, you know, improve or, you know, improve or not with their ventilator time between vitamin C and placebo was an insignificant number, partly because, you know, they had a total of— I believe it was around The total study was around 60, maybe a couple less than that, so the numbers weren't really there to pull that off. Now, one of the things that I'm watching for when this does get through peer review, the study, is— wonder— it's not so much the paper that gets written and the peer reviewers, but when it gets reported on the news, if the primary indicator didn't get statistical significance, so we don't know. did it help that or not? You can't tell when it's not significant. But you could look at that, and if I wanted to put a negative spin in an article or something, I would say, well, vitamin C has no effect on ventilator time. Well, it, it probably does, and there's some other papers that would say that if you did this a little bit better, it probably would. But in this study, it didn't. But what else changed? Okay. One thing is the rate of death, okay? In the original group of people that they put on IV vitamin C who were dying in the ICU, they actually had 100% of the people on IV vitamin C survive and get out of the hospital, and that was not 100% in the— it was like 50 people on vitamin C and about 350 who didn't get vitamin C, so 100% survival was pretty good. Now, In this group, at 28 days after diagnosis, the death rate was lower, and it was significantly lower. And depending— there's different ways to calculate, believe it or not. I mean, you got numbers of deaths, but when they do look at the statistics, there's a couple of different ways to look at and model death rates over time versus the people who in the placebo group. And so intravenous vitamin C had a 2.5 to 4 times lower death rate than the placebo group. So depending on which way you look at it statistically, it's still like if you can improve life living through the treatment, it was something like this where you're in the hospital with COVID 2 times, 2.5 times, 3 times, 4 times anything over, you know, over equal is an improvement in the death rate. So that was important. The other thing that was important, and they looked at a number of factors, but I think the thing that really— so there's a couple of lab tests that they didn't look at that I would have liked them to. They didn't ask me, but I would have liked them to look at because these are lab tests that we've seen in the United States When we do get working with a hospital and they put the patient on IV vitamin C in the ICU, we see some of the laboratory numbers like the D-dimer, et cetera, often go down. And what we'll see sometimes is the hospital will say, well, they're getting better. They take them off vitamin C, the D-dimer goes back up. And so while that's not a study, it's a pattern that I've seen over and over with patients in the hospital. They didn't look at that in this particular study. They looked at a lot of other things. But the one The one marker that reached statistical significance. So if you think about it, you've got roughly 60 people, roughly 30 people placebo, 30 people with vitamin C. You don't have a huge number of people, meaning you're going to get variations between placebo and the vitamin C, but they won't reach a statistical significance because there's, you know, not enough people to power it. So if you get a statistically significant outcome, like the death rate being, you know, lower and something— it is remarkable with a low number of people. Well, the one that made the hugest difference that was statistically significant, and again, this could change, you know, there might be others that come up when they finish peer review, they might redo the statistics, but right now is interleukin-6. And most of you have— most people had never heard of interleukins who, you know, who don't work with immunology prior to COVID, but everybody knows about cytokines and interleukins now because COVID's made them famous. Well, interleukin-6 is one of the infamous cytokine drivers of the even more infamous cytokine storm, the cytokine release syndrome. Our concern with cytokine storms with anything, whether it's, you know, sepsis or another type of infection or COVID, is those are the things that dysregulate your immune response to the point you become inflamed, you can actually die from the cytokine storm. Well, interleukin-6 is one of the triggers in the early part of a cytokine storm. And the important thing that I saw, and these are, these are numbers in picograms per milliliter, which is a very tiny analyte. And that's really not as important as just the raw numbers, which are, like I said, these were each very good significance. The vitamin C group lowered interleukin-6 to around 9 to 9.5 picogram per mL. The placebo group in the same time period had their IL-6, interleukin-6, raise to 158. So you have 9 and some change or 158. It's not like, you know, it went from, you know, IVC lowered it to 10 and the placebo, it went up to 11. This is 9 versus 158. Those are numbers. And because— And I think if they would have checked certain other, you know, hindsight's 20/20 and maybe someone will research this. There's other related markers that they could have checked. And I bet if they would have checked them, those would have also done the same thing because our experience with patients, and this is again, experience, this is not a study, our experience with patients when I'm working with people who are working in hospitals is this same thing happens. And it's not just IL-6 and the patient's not just getting better, which is the overall goal, but also a lot of their other inflammatory markers that we see go up in the people who do die. go down. So that was very remarkable. And I'm, uh, you know, the statistics will be looked at, they'll get redone, but that was one of the bright shining stars of statistical significance. And that is huge because like I say, it probably relates to other markers that would, that would be more likely to lead to your death if they went up and went high. So we have a difference in the death rate at 28 days, uh, meaning vitamin C is somewhere between 2 and 4 times more or less death, you say it that way, than placebo. And then we have this huge marker of an inappropriate response. It's part of your immune system. IL-6 isn't bad. It's just you don't want it going up and up and up. You want it to do its job and go away. Vitamin C, you drop the IL-6, and then, you know, by a factor of, you know, over 100 and, you know, over 148, you know, with placebo it goes up. And then probably other inflammatory markers, if they would have measured them, would have done the same thing. The other thing that is a part of the study that is significant, if you're looking at it, is nobody had to be removed from the study due to study adverse events. So there are people in studies like this, when you get people that are this sick, There, for example, was participants who didn't just have cardiovascular disease but also had, say, cancer and other things. People are going to have problems and pass away and things because they are in the hospital with COVID but they have other stuff going wrong. But nobody, regardless of how sick they were, had to drop out because they got sick because of the vitamin C addition. Yeah. or the placebo edition. And that's good too, because that means that, you know, we kept the people that were in it in, and they were able to finish. And so we could get data on them. Now, I do— this is of interest to me just from a statistical point of view, but they did have to stop enrolling people in the study because in China, and you remember they were ahead of us with COVID time-wise, In China, the numbers of people going in the hospital and needing to be in the ICU for COVID was dropping so rapidly that they, they were not getting more, which is why they didn't go past the around 60 people. So they wanted more people to even out some of these statistical things. They just weren't able to do it. So because people have asked me, why didn't they just put more people in the trial? They ran out of patients, basically. And they didn't wait all year long to do the trial, so they just capped it at whatever it was, 58, 59, 60, something like that, patients. So this is a really important study. I am hoping that it will get out of peer review and get its final publication, and as soon as it does, I will share it. With everybody. I share a lot of these things on my Instagram, which is just DRA Online. Twitter is Dr. Paul Anderson, the number 1, not just Dr., Dr. Paul Anderson, number 1. Facebook is Dr. Anderson, or DRA Online, sorry, Dr. Anderson Online. Instagram's easier, just DRA Online. I share stuff there. We're updating my public website, it'll be shared there. So as soon as As soon as I have it, I will share it. The reason I'm not sharing the authors' names and all that stuff is this is critical. It's critical information. It will help hospitals and doctors in hospitals who are on the fence maybe get off the fence and implement, okay, which is very, very important to, you know, to consider. So I don't want to get it out there In its public form and then have, you know, have the system have a problem with it or whatever. So to recap, we're just about at the end of the program. So that worked out okay. I was able to get through the whole paper and all the background stuff. Normally, you don't need a ton of vitamin C, but we don't make it as humans. So we need some from our diet, etc. When we get sick, we need more. More. Our levels drop. We need more. We also need it biologically more when we're doing all this stuff. When you get something like COVID that creates cytokine problems and all these weird symptoms and problems people have with COVID like clotting and all this other stuff, you need you you need more of this redox activity, which vitamin C is in the middle of. When you're looking at overall prevention, which is what they did in China, if you can have people taking oral vitamin C. C, it's better than not taking it because those that do get sick, the reservoir is at least filled up. I shared some of my own personal experience with people in this country and others who have gotten early IV vitamin C, and then also people have been able to get it in the hospital. And generally speaking, while there's nothing that's perfect and nothing works 100% for people, it is, I believe, a direction that we need to go in North America of adding it in to IV protocols, and I would say pre-hospital is even better from my experience than others. And then it's both safe and effective on different levels when you do need it in the hospital for IV use. Now, do we have, you know, studies with thousands of people in it? No, obviously not. The authors say that, you know, we don't, we just don't have that. But is it something that is likely to create an interaction and a problem and people would be harmed? No. I have personally been involved in, you know, 6 figures worth of intravenous vitamin Cs on one level or another. Yes, over 100,000 doses. It's just, that's just not going to be a problem. You do it this way. Is there a potential big upside? Yes. Not 100%. But any life they save is is worth it, in my opinion. I think that that's really important to consider. And then finally, people will be saying, "Well, where is this study? Why don't you share it?" I'm not going to share it until we have it all the way done and it gets the stamp of approval from the publication because you know early sharing of things sometimes can throw off the publication. Activities and schedule. So it is out there, and I will be the first person to share it with the world, probably. Maybe not, but I'll be one of the first people to share it with the world when it does finish its publication schedule. But we are out of time for today. I am Dr. Paul Anderson with Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. Here every Every week live Thursday, either Facebook Live or on CTR Radio Network. Just finished the new book, Cancer: The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment. You can get that anywhere books are sold. We have the other book, Outside-the-Box Cancer Therapy, where there's a lot more research and I talk a lot about vitamin C, especially around cancer. And there's any other way, a number of ways to get a hold of me, but, you know, Instagram and Facebook. Awesome. Facebook, DRA Online, probably the easiest way to find me, and then you get links to everything else. But been my pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for listening, uh, with the vitamin C COVID update, and I will see you all on the radio next week. Thanks. You've been listening to Medicine and Health with