Harmful Standards of Care
Post #684
Much debate has been occurring over why many people died during COVID.
To explain high death, some blame lock-downs, some blame masks, some blame the withholding of life-saving medicine and/or early treatment, some blame mechanical ventilation, some blame the experimental COVID shots, and some blame … wait for it … some blame COVID, itself.
While there is a lot of blame to go around, one major source of death would be iatrogenic vitamin D deficiency (deficiency that is caused specifically by the treatment that the doctor gives you). Vitamin D is a crucial factor in resistance to infection and more importantly, in resistance to severity and mortality from a given infection.
But for every 15 days that you are out of the sun and in some kind of a hospital ward, your levels of active vitamin D (25-hydryoxyvitamin D) get cut in half. But each time your levels cut in half, your odds of dying double. Here are some reports about that:
Japan Study
At bottom right you can see an exponential increase in the chance of invasive mechanical ventilation or death as the levels of active vitamin D — here marked as 25(OH)D — drop. If an extra category was added at left for < 5 ng/mL, you would expect the chance of death to double again (to a 60% chance of death).
Slovakia Study
At left in the image above is actually the chance of survival and not death. As dots get lower in the lower left corner where vitamin D is lower, then your chance of survival is dropping (same thing as an increased chance of death).
Notice how people with active vitamin D levels of at least 55 ng/mL have an approximate 100% chance of remaining alive.
UAE Study
This image merely shows the increasing odds of COVID severity. At bottom right, the fully-adjusted model shows that being 40% lower in 25(OH)D (“12” is 60% of “20” so it is not quite cut in half) almost doubles the odds ratio for severity from 1.14 up to 1.76.
Sepsis Study
This image isn’t about COVID, per se, but merely about the odds of being stricken with a common risk for intensive care patients: sepsis (an infection circulating through your bloodstream). The increase as you go to the left (as 25-hydroxyvitamin D drops) is more “curved” than it looks — i.e., it is more “exponential" than it looks.
That’s because the vertical scale is not consistent, but is actually changing as you rise up the graph (a quasi-log scale). Here is a graphic depiction of the increased risk of death that people experienced as doctors kept them in ICU sometimes for months at a time:
A patient kept for 2 months in ICU will have experienced approximately a 16-fold increase in baseline odds of death — given their baseline level of active vitamin D at entry. A critic may say that people “needed” to stay in ICU for months, because they had hypoxemia which was refractory to oxygen treatment.
But the time-to-death model for COVID shows that, when it kills you, it does not take 2 months to kill you (95% of all COVID deaths occur by Day 35 after symptom onset). So there needs to be a much better explanation than that, for people being held in ICU for “months.”
The “COVID explanation” does not suffice.
A Better Explanation
A better explanation for “refractory hypoxemia” is methemoglobinemia (oxidized hemoglobin).
With methemoglobinemia, the pulse oximeter converges on 85% oxygen regardless of your true oxygen saturation level, due to the way that pulse oximetry works by detecting color bands in oxygenated vs. deoxygenated blood. Some terms for it are occult hypoxemia and happy hypoxemia.
It is relatively easy to give someone methemoglobinemia, though. Many drugs cause it, drinking high-nitrate water can cause it, EMFs can cause it, infection can cause it, and even something so innocuous as eating beets (source of nitrate) could cause it. The longer you have someone in your care, the more you can increase it.
It doesn’t have to be doctors causing it, you could accomplish it with the military.
But because COVID protocols did not allow for anyone to remain on “room air” at 85% saturation, people had oxygen forced into them. When forcing oxygen into them “didn’t work” (the O2 supplementation didn’t raise their “O2 sat”), then doctors escalated the therapies — and extended the hospital stays of the patients.
Evidence suggests that COVID protocols were harmful to COVID patients. It is possible that over half of all recorded COVID deaths were secondary to a treatment-caused deficiency in vitamin D. The proximal cause of death would merely be a nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infection when your low D status put you at risk.
Doctors (and hospitals, and the military) should not be allowed to quarantine patients away from their families, keeping them inside of “COVID wards” while preventing visitation or the implementation of patient preferences.
That’s because doctors, hospitals, and the military cannot be considered the “final authority” on how you keep people alive. History shows that they can be very wrong.
Reference
Kempker JA, Panwar B, Judd SE, Jenny NS, Wang HE, Gutiérrez OM. Plasma 25-Hydroxyvitamin D and the Longitudinal Risk of Sepsis in the REGARDS Cohort. Clin Infect Dis. 2019 May 17;68(11):1926-1931. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciy794. PMID: 30239610; PMCID: PMC6522683. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30239610/
Takase T, Tsugawa N, Sugiyama T, Ikesue H, Eto M, Hashida T, Tomii K, Muroi N. Association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and COVID-19 severity. Clin Nutr ESPEN. 2022 Jun;49:256-263. doi: 10.1016/j.clnesp.2022.04.003. Epub 2022 Apr 9. PMID: 35623823; PMCID: PMC8994250. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8994250/
AlSafar H, Grant WB, Hijazi R, Uddin M, Alkaabi N, Tay G, Mahboub B, Al Anouti F. COVID-19 Disease Severity and Death in Relation to Vitamin D Status among SARS-CoV-2-Positive UAE Residents. Nutrients. 2021 May 19;13(5):1714. doi: 10.3390/nu13051714. PMID: 34069412; PMCID: PMC8159141. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8159141/
Smaha J, Jackuliak P, Kužma M, Max F, Binkley N, Payer J. Vitamin D Deficiency Prevalence in Hospitalized Patients with COVID-19 Significantly Decreased during the Pandemic in Slovakia from 2020 to 2022 Which Was Associated with Decreasing Mortality. Nutrients. 2023 Feb 23;15(5):1132. doi: 10.3390/nu15051132. PMID: 36904131; PMCID: PMC10005285. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10005285/