Vitamin C and COVID Update

Hey, it's Dr. A. This is another newsletter update, and this particular update is about the newsletter called Vitamin C Use in COVID-19, and it's an update that is fairly recent on the research that has come out since COVID started. Obviously, that's not a ton of time, but there's sort of an expediency to getting research done around COVID, so it's a little faster than normal. Now, vitamin C and COVID is something that I did some, well, a number of things on around in the beginning of COVID and the reason that I was asked to do those things is that I have a long history of use of and research of vitamin C in illness, and so I was asked to do a couple of things. One was an international physician's update. Now, That was very early in COVID, and so I talked about, at that point, the experience to date, again, you're over a year ago now, but the experience to date with the hospitals in Wuhan, China, and I collaborated through their database and looked at their outcomes and talked about, well, what is it that would be helpful, how would it be helpful in the hospital setting, etc. When I did that, then I started to get some inquiries from some hospitals and then some actual states in the United States where their departments of health said, well, we might want a protocol for hospitals in our state if we decide to use vitamin C. Now, vitamin C in the hospital setting that we're talking about right at the moment is normally in the intravenous setting, so this is usually if you're fairly sick, you're in the ICU, it's going to be one of the IVs going into you. What they found initially with their case series in China was that there was about 360 patients, and 50 of them they gave them continuous IV vitamin C infusions, and the other ones they didn't. And of the about 50 that got the continuous vitamin C infusions, none of them died. They also got out of the hospital sooner, and of the others who didn't get the vitamin C, they obviously had a higher propensity for dying and complications. So they thought, well, this is not a, you know, it's not a bad outcome and it's fairly inexpensive, etc. Now, people have asked, and it's, it's not a common drug used in a lot of hospitals, though they're using vitamin C intravenously now more in sepsis research and things of that nature. So it's starting, but people said, well, is it even FDA approved? And yes, vitamin C as a drug. So the infusion drug is called Ascor, A-S-C-O-R, and that's an FDA-approved drug. And it's basically just a vitamin C, 500 milligrams per mL, and then that's infused a particular way. So what I did early on then was I published which you can get links to on the website, but, and also in this newsletter, I published a hospital protocol that was a merger of my experience with intravenous vitamin C, but more specifically the application through the lens of what they did in China as a way to use it in the ICU. Now, what I will say is that Once I published that, we sent it out to the states that were interested, and what most of the states decided was rather than make it a state mandate, they were going to leave it up to the individual hospitals. And now there are some hospitals that are using IV vitamin C and many who are not, but they're thinking about it actually. So things are slow to change in the hospital world. But part of what happened when I published that, it started when I did the international physician training through ISOM, and then when I published the first protocol, was people are saying, well, whoa, wait a minute, you know, this is a new therapy, you're going off a case series out of 3 hospitals in China, and yeah, it looks, you know, looks interesting, but we don't have any randomized controlled trials or human controlled trials, and we need that. Well, there are a number of human trials that were started early on. Right away, but they take time to get done. So one of the things I update in this particular newsletter is that at the writing of that, and I think still to this day, 2 of the trials were published and they used similar— one used the exact same protocol to the one I published, and then the other used a lower dose protocol, but basically with hospitalized patients. Okay. Now, talked about this before, but when you report trial data, you're supposed to make a distinction between the information that came out that is statistically significant, meaning the numbers worked out statistically that if it said that the trial did X or Y, it really probably did do X or Y, right? Statistical significance is what you're supposed to really report about, and then you can comment on all the stuff that didn't reach statistical significance because either you didn't have enough patients or it wasn't a big enough spread between the 2 arms or whatever, but you're not supposed to make conclusions based on the non-significant data. So in the newsletter, I very specifically outlined what was in and outside the line, but as a matter of summary, both of the trials showed improvement in the patients and shorter time stay in the hospital. And especially in North America, every day you're not in the hospital is a day that you're not, you know, paying. You're also not using up a hospital bed, and you're also actually more likely to live the shorter time that you're in the hospital. So that really is helpful to be in the shorter time. Some of the data showed that the sicker you were, the less likely you were to die from COVID if you had vitamin C versus the control group who didn't get vitamin C. vitamin C. And then one of the most remarkable things chemically was the infamous interleukin-6, IL-6, was actually not just a little bit lower but markedly lower in the vitamin C group than in the non-vitamin C group. And if you recall a lot of the furor around, you know, interleukin-6, IL-6, that's the trigger, one of the cytokine triggers for the cytokine release syndrome or cytokine storm which can kill you, but also it's a trigger for a lot of other pro-inflammatory things that, you know, maybe initially are not so bad, but chronically is not a good thing to have, you know, kind of floating around in there. So there were a number of really good things that came out of it that reached statistical significance. Again, if you want the data, it's in the newsletter and you can take a look there. The other thing I do make comment on is they're right, like the day before I finished writing the original newsletter, a publication came out saying that oral vitamin C and zinc, they tried them in a trial and it didn't help COVID. One of the problems, and I get into this with that trial, was a few-fold, but in the newsletter I get into the fact that that data didn't reach statistical significance, so you're not really supposed to make a lot of conclusions from that. Also, probably the amount of time that they were looking at was too short. And even the authors of the study came back after I wrote the newsletter, and I got some communication from some university friend connections that basically said— and they put out a letter, the authors can amend things or put out letters— they said, well, you know, maybe even though we didn't reach significance, we might need to look at this data differently because it might actually be that the vitamin C or the zinc was helpful. So the problem is that those things get headlines when they're negative, and then you think, oh well, there's no point in vitamin C or zinc, and that's actually not the case. As a matter of fact, now when I work with people who are in hospitals with COVID a lot of the hospitals in their standard orders, in their standing orders, have people on zinc, vitamin C, etc., and they'll send them home and have them take vitamin C when they get home, you know, so there's been a big shift in the last year. Well, if you want all that that detail and all the backstory and the references and the resources, and yes, we do finally have randomized controlled trials in humans that show positive effect. You want all that stuff and all the references, just go to the description box. There'll be a link to the newsletter. Also, if you want a shortcut, dranow.com, Dr. A Now, and go to the newsletter tab there. Again, I really appreciate you guys listening, appreciate all the comments and the likes, shares, subscribes, all of those things, and appreciate seeing you. I'll see you again next.