In this Q&A video, Dr. A addresses the recurring question of whether intravenous (IV) vitamin C can be used to treat COVID‑19. He explains that IV vitamin C is an FDA‑approved drug for scurvy but not for COVID‑19, and outlines how high‑dose IV administration can achieve pharmacologic effects not seen with oral intake. Dr. A reviews an early uncontrolled case series from three Wuhan hospitals that reported zero deaths and shorter hospital stays among a subset of COVID‑19 patients receiving IV vitamin C. He describes how, based on that report and his own experience, he drafted a standardized IV vitamin C protocol in April 2020, which faced resistance from U.S. health authorities and hospital administrators, resulting in only about 1 % of U.S. hospitals adopting the therapy. He then summarizes the first two published randomized controlled trials, which showed modest benefits such as reduced length of stay and lowered IL‑6 levels in the treatment arm. Dr. A clarifies that IV vitamin C does not cure or prevent COVID‑19 but may be a useful adjunct in severe illness, noting that access in North America often requires patient advocacy or legal action. The video concludes with a call for subscriptions and a promise of more Q&A content.
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COVID started to be a thing around the world and I heard that Wuhan, China was sort of ground zero as far as we knew, I started to be asked about, well, do you think vitamin C might work with COVID Now, why would people ask that? Seems like a weird, weird non sequitur kind of question. Hey, it's Dr. A, and on this channel I answer your questions that come in usually through the comments section on under the YouTube videos. The question that came in was one that I've gotten repeatedly since almost February of 2020, and that is the question around vitamin C and COVID. And specifically in this one, we just want to limit this discussion to intravenous vitamin C, IV vitamin C, right into your vein. And COVID, what's the story with that? What do we know? What do we not know? It's intravenous vitamin C. Sounds like a strange concept. It is actually an FDA-approved drug, if you will. Is it approved for COVID? No, it's not. It's not approved for a lot of things. It's a drug for scurvy, which is the deficiency state for vitamin C. It's being researched very heavily in sepsis, overwhelming infectious disease in the body. COVID started to be a thing around the world, and I heard that Wuhan, China was sort of ground zero as far as we knew, I started to be asked about, well, do you think vitamin C might work with COVID Now, why would people ask that? Seems like a weird, weird non sequitur kind of question, and if you look, the National Institute of Health has, you know, not hundreds and hundreds maybe, but a lot of papers around vitamin C and its use in infectious disease and cancer and other stuff. Now, yes, it's controversial and People don't think that nutrients could do that much, but if you take a nutrient, you put it at higher levels into your venous access, into your vascular system, your blood, it can actually do a lot of things that it wouldn't do normally if you took it orally. A group of, I believe it was 3 hospitals in Wuhan area of China that were hit by the original ground zero of the infection, started to, in one case, use IV, intravenous vitamin C, in their ICU hospitalized patients with COVID And in their very first group, and this is just a case report, so it's just saying, here's what we did, here's how it came out. Okay. Not a controlled study, all that business. Basically, out of about 360, they took about, say, 50 or 60 of them and put them on IV vitamin C. There's 2 things that happened in that group that were getting IV vitamin C. Number one, nobody died, which was not true of the other groups. And number 2, their hospital stay was shorter. So this was sort of big news that came out, and then a lot of people, you know, I publicized this, other people publicized it, we got a lot of backlash that said, well, but that could be any type of statistical error effect, it could be, you know, all sorts of bias could go into that, etc. Sure, yeah, you— it is what it is, it's an observation of a bunch of cases. The next hurdle was people said, well, this seems like it's safe, it seems like it's fairly low cost, both true, why don't we use this in some of our hospitals here in North America? So I was asked by some government officials to make a protocol because we didn't have a COVID IV vitamin C protocol here in the U.S. Well, I published based on both the Wuhan, China experience, based on other doctors and my own experience using intravenous vitamin C in chronically ill people, infectious disease, etc., published a protocol that was sort of a homogenization of all that experience and made it available, and so that was published, I think, in April of 2020, so really early on. The bottom line with that one was it went and it got through to certain— when it went through the government, what happened was The state, you know, like say the Department of Health or whoever's in charge would get it to the point, and then somebody would stop it and say, no, we don't want to be told what to do here at the hospital. We don't want the state telling us we should do, you know, this treatment, so we'll do it if we want to. So it didn't ever get anywhere going through the government. Imagine that. But a lot of hospitals on their own had already started to mimic the Wuhan, China experience. Others took it on à la carte, so if the patient really wanted it, they would do it, and others made it a part of their protocol. So over time, about 1% of hospitals in the United States actually did and do IV vitamin C with COVID patients. The next thing though that they said was, well, we don't have randomized controlled trials. It's kind of the gold standard of making a new treatment available anywhere, but especially in the hospital. Well, at the same time we were doing all this really early in COVID, trials were starting. So I think like 10 trials for vitamin C and COVID. 2 of them published a few months ago, and I wrote up a summary about that, and that's in a newsletter as well. And the bottom line with those is they showed, number one, that you had a reduction in the number of hospital days, and number two, depending on which trial you looked at of the 2 that were published, You either had a lowering of a very important factor called IL-6. You want that to go down. It went down a lot, or you had other parameters that were better in the treatment group, the IV vitamin C group, than in the non-treatment group. Does it like does it prevent or cure COVID? No. Intravenous vitamin C is a huge, huge thing. It is a very important thing to use. in critical illness, but there's a lot of reasons for that. I'm going to do a separate video about vitamin C and how it works in critical illness. So it really does have a place in treatment. It's being used in many other parts of the world much more than in North America, but it is something that might be available, but in North America you normally have to ask and kind of push to the degree that some people have had to sue hospitals And then finally get it done for their loved one, which is a sad commentary, but that's the way it is. Again, I really want to thank all of you new subscribers. Please like, share, subscribe, notifications, all the stuff that we're supposed to tell you to do. And I do appreciate your support, and you're going to see a lot more of these question and answer videos from me over time. So thank you very much.
