In this episode of Medicine Health, Dr. Paul Anderson discusses the role of vitamin C in COVID-19, emphasizing the need to follow local public‑health guidelines such as CDC recommendations, which remain cautious due to limited evidence. He recounts early Wuhan reports where both intravenous (IV) and oral vitamin C were used—IV in ICU patients and oral powder distributed to the community to reduce hospitalizations. Dr. Anderson explains how dosing differs between inpatient settings (continuous low‑dose infusions) and outpatient or office settings (short, high‑dose infusions of 25‑75 g) and shares his anecdotal experience that early high‑dose IV vitamin C can shorten illness duration and prevent hospital admission. He describes a practical how‑to guide he co‑authored for hospital staff on safely administering IV vitamin C. The conversation then moves to emerging randomized controlled trials, which, despite differing endpoints, consistently show trends toward shorter hospital stays, higher survival, and reductions in inflammatory markers like IL‑6 in the vitamin C groups. Dr. Anderson concludes that vitamin C is not a cure but appears to be a useful adjunct when used correctly, while acknowledging that the evidence base is still evolving. He promises to share study links in the show notes and encourages listeners to subscribe and stay updated.
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Good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. Thank you for tuning in, uh, wherever you're listening or watching. Please like, share, subscribe, and hit notifications because sometimes the algorithm pushes us over, and we really do appreciate everyone's support and all the new viewers that we're getting. But today we're talking about vitamin C, and specifically in this subsection COVID-19 and vitamin C. I've done a lot of different interviews on this since COVID became a big deal because of my history doing research with IV vitamin C. Very early in the pandemic, I was asked to comment and do some looking at what they were doing in Wuhan and other places, and also just comment on, you know, the practicality of vitamin C as a, as a support agent. Now, The first thing I want to say when it comes to COVID-19 and anything is, of course, whenever we talk, especially, you know, on public social media, we have to be careful how we describe things when it comes to COVID. And we need to, you know, make sure that you know that whatever it is your local or country's public health policies are, is what you should be doing, and whatever the standard of care they have decided is supposed to be there is what you should be doing. Here in the US, we have the Centers for Disease Control. They have a whole list of things that are on the menu, and they have a whole list of things like vitamin C that they have a lot of comment on. And we get to the CDC and you look at the— it's a long write-up about vitamin C. There They're sort of very cautious, and, you know, they say, well, we just don't have enough evidence to say yes or no that we should be doing this. And so you just need to know that that's the state of where it is, at least in the US where I'm filming. I will tell you that in other countries, they don't have all of those distinctions. In other countries, a lot of times these things are used right alongside standard of care treatments. So how did vitamin C and COVID first get some notoriety? Well, this was what I was asked to speak about early on, and that was the fact that it was reported out of Wuhan, China in 2019 that of many, many things they were trying with the COVID-19 patients in the hospital, one of the things that they tried was intravenous vitamin C. And so somebody saw that and they said, well, you know, Paul used to do research on that, uh, let's have him do some trainings for us, let's have him talk about it. So we've done a lot of that over the years. Now we'll get into the mechanics of what they did in Wuhan and then what we studied since then, but you need to keep in mind when it comes to that particular reporting of those cases from Wuhan that those were people in the hospital and who were very sick. Most of them were in the intensive care unit, and so the stakes are very high, but also you generally are in the hospital, you don't leave till you're either better or you die, and so you're captive, so they're going to do something with you as an intervention. The other thing that got less press back then with COVID-19 in Wuhan and vitamin C was that, uh, they had imported to Wuhan large, large quantities of vitamin C powder, ascorbic acid powder. And the important part about that is their goal was to give that out to people, uh, in the community to try and keep them out of the hospital. Because the hospitals were full and the ICUs were full, and they thought it doesn't matter how good this stuff works, if it even works a little bit, anything we can give people to keep them out of the hospital is better. So as a preventive or maybe a slowing down agent, etc., oral vitamin C and a number of other things were used. I've done whole programs and newsletters on that, etc. So there was both these things going on at Wuhan. Well, then you might ask, well, would there be a difference if, let's say, especially now with Omicron where you're less likely to go to the hospital, what if I go to my doctor and my doctor does intravenous vitamin C? Are they going to do the same thing in their office as they would do in the hospital at Wuhan or one of these other studies that we're going to talk about? And the bottom line is no, not usually, because the dynamics are different. In the hospital, I have you there, you can't leave, I've got IV access in you, I can give you either continuous slow drip of vitamin C 24 hours a day, or every hour I can give you a little tiny dose, or every 12 hours a little bit bigger dose, whatever. And it basically keeps your vitamin C levels up because we know that they go down during illness. And the lower they go, the more inflammatory we are, the slower our immune cells work, et cetera, et cetera. So when it comes to IV vitamin C in a hospital, you're gonna tend to get lower doses over a longer period of time. If you go to a doctor's office where they do IV vitamin C and you're getting sick with anything, they will probably give you a higher dose in a shorter amount of time. So you think, well, will that still help me? My experience personally, and this is anecdotal, I do not have this in a research study that's published, but my experience is if we could get to people with a higher dose, so 25, 50, or 75 grams of vitamin C intravenous, that's a lot of vitamin C, early when they were febrile, first couple of days, and we could do that once or twice in a row, often the disease time period was shortened, and also none of those patients, even back in the Alpha and Delta days that we did that preemptively with, ever had to go into the hospital. So yes, that's anecdotal, that's not, you know, published anywhere, but that has been observed in many places. So the dosing does depend on where your setting is. It's easier to give you a shorter IV with a higher dose, let your body distribute it over the next 24 hours if you're outpatient. If you're inpatient, it's easier and probably just safer to either have you on a continuous drip or an every-hour drip or every 12 hours, but so you're kind of keeping your vitamin C levels up continuously long term. Now, what did the Wuhan hospitals note first off? Well, the first thing that they noted was that the people who got the vitamin C— so they distributed it to a group with COVID who got vitamin C in the ICU and a group without vitamin C who just got standard of care. Everyone got standard of care, okay? It wasn't like vitamin C replaced that. But the people that got in Wuhan who got the vitamin C IV had shorter hospital stays, they were a little bit more likely to get off ventilators and leave the hospital and live. So that looked really good. So then everybody said, when we started talking about this early on, the first thing was, well, you know, here in North America we don't do that much vitamin C in the hospitals. And that's still true, even though we do have an approved drug from the FDA, intravenous drug called Ascor. And it's vitamin C for intravenous use. We don't use it as much as maybe we should, and it's used in research. So the first questions that we started to get were, we don't know how to use vitamin C. You know, I mean, they know how to do it technically, but we don't know about dosing. We don't know the pharmacy end of it. We, you know, whatever. So I worked with a medical editor, and we published basically a how-to, very short publication, how to use vitamin C intravenously in the hospital for things such as COVID-19. And it also had instructions not only for the medical staff but for the nursing staff and the pharmacy staff, just how to do it, what to do, whatever. And what I will say is in places where we were able to work with the ICU physician and to start it. And again, this is anecdotal. These are my cases, my personal experience, but it matches other experience. We saw things similar to what they saw in Wuhan, and this was fairly early on. This is back even with, you know, the original strain, Alpha, Delta, etc. So the, you know, the, the more dangerous strains. And we had people who could get off their ventilators and go home, people with a lot of comorbidities. a lot of that sort of thing happened. Now, did it happen a lot? No, because if you bring a new medical treatment to a hospital, you have to have a very motivated, you know, someone in the hospital to actually make that happen. And time being of the essence, especially with an ICU, especially on a ventilator or something, a COVID patient, often by the time they sorted it out whether they were going to do it or not, the patient would have passed away in many cases. So earlier is better, and generally speaking, we saw the same thing they did in Wuhan. Well, then the next hurdle came in that people were saying, well, yeah, but there's no randomized controlled trials, so this is all anecdotal. Yeah, it's true, it was. Well, then we started to have randomized controlled trials that were set up because they saw, well, here's the reports from Wuhan, we got reports from elsewhere, Let's do a randomized controlled trial. I've reported on the two that have published. There's a few more that are in the works and/or being published, and there's some reviews now in the works that are being published. And the bottom line was when they did the randomized controlled trials, although the two, the first two that got published had slightly different endpoints that they were looking at, the the overall theme was preserved, which is shorter hospital time, higher survivability. And then in one case, they were looking at chemistry, blood chemistry, and the infamous interleukin-6, which is associated with cytokine storms and stuff like that, would come down in the vitamin C group and didn't come down in the other group, and a whole number of other things. So I think the important thing about it is, is it magic? Is it a cure? Is it whatever? No, no. Is it probably a really, really good tool in my personal experience using it in COVID and other infections? Yes, if you know what you're doing and do it correctly. Is it still really early in the research end of it to like prove that that's going to help? Yes, it really is, and that's where a lot of the reticence from hospital-based staff comes from, is they just don't have enough data behind it, and that's kind of what CDC says. If I get a chance over on the YouTube channel when we upload this, and then we can— we'll do it in the show notes for the podcast, I will get some links to not only the studies but some of the newer reviews that have come out, etc., and we'll get these things uploaded. So if you're watching live today, it'll be uploaded probably next week sometime, so we'll put that together. But we're about out of time here on Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. I just want to kind of update everyone on IV vitamin C and COVID-19. Obviously taking it orally as a support and minor preventive, very useful. Intravenously, if your labs check out and doing it as an outpatient or when you're early in the illness, really is supported at least by many people's experience as being helpful in shortening disease, not needing to go to the hospital, etc. And then if you're inpatient and you're in a facility that will do intravenous vitamin C, again, our data now shows, and it matches the Wuhan experience and my personal experience, that the low and slow dosing like they do in the hospital continuously is associated with more likelihood of getting out of the hospital and shorter hospital stays than those who don't get vitamin C. And cool thing is it can be done right alongside all of the other standard of care things. It's not an either/or. All right, that gets us out of time for today on Medicine and Health. I'm Dr. Paul, and I really appreciate all of the new subscribers. So whether you're on a PodBurner or on YouTube, please like, share, and subscribe. Over on YouTube, it's Uh, DRA Online, Dr. A Online, and you can find us there if you just search that. And you can subscribe, do the notifications wherever you are. It's very important, uh, because the algorithm sometimes pushes us out of your feeds, and the notification will let you know when we do something new. All right, thank you very much. I will see you all next week on the podcast.
