(2 of 2) Every vaccine is intended to reduce infection, severity and/or transmission of infectious diseases whose current level of prevalence, transmission and severity is much higher than it would be if everyone supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently (as ratios of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity) to attain at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D which the immune system needs to function properly. Many people have half this, or less.
Therefore vaccines should come second to efforts to get everyone's immune system working properly - which can only be done with proper vitamin D3 supplementation. (There is very little vitamin D3 in foods, fortified or not. UV-B radiation on ideally white skin can produce plenty of vitamin D3, but it is not available all year round - and damages DNA, so raising the risk of skin cancer.) See Prof. Sunil Wimalawansa's recommendations: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-how-much and https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/how-much-vitamin-d3-to-take.
There's not a lot of research into vitamin D and pertussis. However, it is a bacterial infection, and everyone should be aware of 2014 research by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that with 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) or more pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D (as measured in "vitamin D" blood tests), the risk, separately, of hospital acquired infections and surgical site infections was about 2.5%.
With 18 ng/mL preoperative circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is common for many people who have not had a lot of ultraviolet B exposure on ideally white skin, and who do not supplement vitamin D3 properly, the risk of each type of infection rose to 25%.
This shows that serious and potentially deadly weakness in the immune system - here regarding the bacterial pathogens which cause both types of post-operative infection - is caused by 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels which are normal in most countries.
In the absence of proper vitamin D3 supplementation, people with dark skin who live far from the equator have even lower 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels than the white skinned people who live there. This is probably the biggest preventable cause of the well known health disparities which afflict dark skinned and/or sun-avoidant people who live far from the equator.
There is very little vitamin D3 in food, fortified or not. There is no such thing as "vitamin D rich foods" which can provide sufficient vitamin D3 to meet the needs of the immune system, though such foods can provide enough, for people with very little skin-produced or supplemental vitamin D3 intake, to enable the kidneys to better regulate calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism, at least to avoid the childhood developmental bone condition rickets.
To attain a healthy level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D circulating in the bloodstream without the need for blood tests or medical monitoring, without excessive UV-B skin exposure, it is necessary to take an average daily amount of supplemental vitamin D3 which is calculated as a ratio of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity.
For 70 kg (154 lb) body weight, without obesity, 0.125 milligrams (1/8000th of a gram = 5000 IU) vitamin D3 a day, on average, will attain a healthy 25-hydroxyvitamin D level: 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L in the UK, Australia etc.) which is 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass. This is what is measured in "vitamin D" blood tests.
This level is higher than what most doctors think is necessary, because they are only aiming to attain what is needed for proper kidney function regarding regulating calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism: 20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L).
The scarily high sounding "5000 IUs" per day is a gram every 22 years - and pharma grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram.
If everyone supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently to attain at least the 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs to work properly, then there would be numerous benefits, including:
1 - Little or no pandemic spread of COVID-19, including current more infectious variants, even in a population which had no immunity to SARS-CoV-2 due to prior infection or vaccination. Handwashing and not breathing, sneezing or coughing into most other people's faces are always good ideas, but there would be no need for masks, social distancing, lockdowns, real vaccines (Novavax) or the quasi-vaccine gene-therapy injections (Pfizer and Moderna mRNA - and AstraZeneca and J&J adenovirus vector).
There would be many fewer infected people, primarily due to each infected person having a less severe disease and so shedding fewer viruses. R0 would be below the pandemic level of 1.0 in almost all circumstances - the possible exceptions being people in confined spaces such as hospitals or submarines. Those infected would much more rarely need hospitalisation or die, assuming that inexpensive, generally safe, effective, treatments such as ivermectin were used in hospitals, or for outpatients with, or at significant risk of developing, serious symptoms.
2 - Likewise influenza and other infectious diseases, including pertussis (whooping cough).
3 - Greatly reduced rates of sepsis, which killed about 11 million people worldwide in 2017.
4 - Reduced risk of in-utero, peri-natal and neurodevelopmental problems including low birth weight, pre-eclampsia, autism, intellectual disability schizophrenia and ADHD: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2.
5 - *Greatly* reduced risk of neurodegenerative disease: Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, multiple system atrophy, Alzheimer's disease etc.: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3.
6 - Reduced risk and severity of numerous inflammatory auto-immune diseases.
(1 of 2) Thanks very much for this article. Some, perhaps most, vaccines or quasi-vaccines are over-rated.
(The mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 injections are not vaccines according to long-standing definitions, since they do not provide an antigen to stimulate an immune response. They are gene therapies, by the EU definition, since they use genetic techniques to program human cells to generate facsimiles of the viral spike protein. These protein molecules are the antigens which stimulate the immune response, which destroy each such cell and, ideally, builds long-lasting immunity against viruses which have similar spike proteins on their surface.)
See also Igor Chudov's article https://www.igor-chudov.com/p/influenza-vaccine-is-perfect-example on influenza vaccine effectiveness. Even by their dodgy methods of calculating this, since there are no placebo-controlled randomized controlled trial, the VE figures are modestly positive and negative, with a very wide range of uncertainty. Here with their 95% confidence ranges in brackets, are the supposed percentages of effectiveness (positive is protective, negative increases the risk of hospitalization):
+11% (-19 to +33%) To 18 years.
+26% (-14 to +52%) 18 - 64 years.
-3% (-54 to +31%) 65+ years.
This protection was described as "low to non-significant".
We can easily tell that the authorities, with many medical professionals following their guidance, are either knowingly lying to us, or at least are egregiously ignorant of the best research, regarding the actual protection afforded by these influenza vaccines, which they recommend annually for everyone of 6 months age or more.
We the public rightfully expects all these supposed experts, whose salaries we pay, to be honest about the risks and benefits of all the medical interventions they are responsible for. We shouldn't have to read research articles ourselves to find out the truth.
This condition of systematic over-promotion of vaccines in general (I guess some are genuinely safe enough, effective and worth taking for at least some subset of the population) persists in large part due to the failings of the majorities of whole professions, worldwide: medical professionals, vaccinologists, virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, public health officials, academic publishers and the mainstream media.
This decades-old cult of overly estimating the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is also driven, directly, by many people - probably the majority of the public - hoping and choosing to believe that their immune systems can be significantly strengthened, for each specific disease, by a small, symbolically painful and so sacrificial, steely injection by a member of the medical priesthood, of a fluid devised by team of PhDs working for great international corporations, produced by high-tech methods in precisely controlled conditions.
Far too many people regard any challenge to their cherished, faith based (they don't read the research) belief in the value of vaccines as an attempt to increase "vaccine hesitancy". What they really want is for everyone to get *vaccinated*. The word is often pronounced with maximum emphasis, as if it is a singular and overridingly beneficial *good* - and indeed a public *duty* by which each person can prevent themselves from carrying a pernicious disease which is likely to infect other people.
Far too many people dismiss those questioning the vaccinophilic orthodoxy as troublemakers - those who shirk, and encourage other to shirk, their responsibility to society, which is to get *vaccinated* as experts recommend.
This siding with the corrupted so-called experts blinds many people to the seriousness of the situation, which would take a very long description, but which includes corruption of government and the medical profession, billions of dollars spent researching infectious diseases - all of which would be less of a problem if everyone supplemented enough vitamin D3 for their immune systems to work properly (see my second comment and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/) - with some of that research leading to gain of function work on viruses, which in one instance at least *caused* a pandemic of worldwide disastrous proportions: SARS-CoV-2 -> COVID-19. https://vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/
Furthermore, this corrupted interlocked system of researchers, pharmaceutical companies and others has for four years covered up the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2. They argue that the virus arose from zoonotic transfer, and so argue that *more* virological research, including gain of function research, is required to prepare humanity for future pandemics (they imply that all pandemics of novel pathogens result from zoonotic transfer). A key part of their argument and belief in the urgency of such research is their belief that the best, or only, way of tackling such pandemics is **vaccination** - and that all this research is necessary to the rapid development and deployment of vaccines.
Until recently I had believed that it was our duty, as adults, to be vaccinated against pertussis, partly to protect ourselves, but most importantly to prevent ourselves from infecting newborns and infants who were at serious risk of harm or death from this disease, and who were too young to be vaccinated.
Now I have learned that while this may have been true of the cellular pertussis vaccines, that these were abandoned over a decade ago due to the harm and death they inflicted on some children (adults as well?) and that the new acellular pertussis vaccine is well known, by researchers at least, to be ineffective at stopping transmission. For instance, from Warfel et al. 2013, "Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model" https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1314688110 .
Now we learn that these acellular vaccines not only do little or nothing to stop transmission from an infected person, or to stop a person from being infected, but that they may increase transmission by increasing the chance of infection and/or by increasing severity and/or that the infection may be asymptomatic, so the infected person does not know to isolate themselves.
Since these so-called experts, deliberately or out of ignorance, systematically mislead the public about the risks and benefits of both influenza and pertussis vaccines, and since they have done so spectacularly with the mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 so-called vaccines, there is no reason to trust, on face value, anything they tell the public about vaccines, infectious diseases or any other health matter.
This leaves us in the unfortunate position of having to do our own research in fields which are complex and contentious, in order to protect ourselves firstly from the diseases in question and from the frequently harmful interventions which the so-called experts recommend we accept and pay for.
I'm in my fifties and recently went in for a medical check-up. The doctor said it was time for me to get a tetanus shot (interestingly, he didn't push the Covid shot). I said no thanks, and he replied that I could get scratched by a twig in my backyard and get tetanus (I was thinking, oh really now). Later he pushed the shot again and said it would also protect me from pertussis. Not something that had ever crossed my mind to worry over.
(2 of 2) Every vaccine is intended to reduce infection, severity and/or transmission of infectious diseases whose current level of prevalence, transmission and severity is much higher than it would be if everyone supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently (as ratios of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity) to attain at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D which the immune system needs to function properly. Many people have half this, or less.
Therefore vaccines should come second to efforts to get everyone's immune system working properly - which can only be done with proper vitamin D3 supplementation. (There is very little vitamin D3 in foods, fortified or not. UV-B radiation on ideally white skin can produce plenty of vitamin D3, but it is not available all year round - and damages DNA, so raising the risk of skin cancer.) See Prof. Sunil Wimalawansa's recommendations: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-how-much and https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/how-much-vitamin-d3-to-take.
There's not a lot of research into vitamin D and pertussis. However, it is a bacterial infection, and everyone should be aware of 2014 research by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that with 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) or more pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D (as measured in "vitamin D" blood tests), the risk, separately, of hospital acquired infections and surgical site infections was about 2.5%.
This is Quraishi et al. 2014: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/1782085. See discussion and clearer, combined, graphs at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-50ngmL.
With 18 ng/mL preoperative circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is common for many people who have not had a lot of ultraviolet B exposure on ideally white skin, and who do not supplement vitamin D3 properly, the risk of each type of infection rose to 25%.
This shows that serious and potentially deadly weakness in the immune system - here regarding the bacterial pathogens which cause both types of post-operative infection - is caused by 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels which are normal in most countries.
In the absence of proper vitamin D3 supplementation, people with dark skin who live far from the equator have even lower 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels than the white skinned people who live there. This is probably the biggest preventable cause of the well known health disparities which afflict dark skinned and/or sun-avoidant people who live far from the equator.
There is very little vitamin D3 in food, fortified or not. There is no such thing as "vitamin D rich foods" which can provide sufficient vitamin D3 to meet the needs of the immune system, though such foods can provide enough, for people with very little skin-produced or supplemental vitamin D3 intake, to enable the kidneys to better regulate calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism, at least to avoid the childhood developmental bone condition rickets.
To attain a healthy level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D circulating in the bloodstream without the need for blood tests or medical monitoring, without excessive UV-B skin exposure, it is necessary to take an average daily amount of supplemental vitamin D3 which is calculated as a ratio of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity.
Please see such recommendations, from New Jersey based Professor of Medicine, at https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/how-much-vitamin-d3-to-take. These are his slight simplification, announced in an FLCCC podcast, of the recommendations in his 2022 article in Nutrition: "Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19": https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997.
For 70 kg (154 lb) body weight, without obesity, 0.125 milligrams (1/8000th of a gram = 5000 IU) vitamin D3 a day, on average, will attain a healthy 25-hydroxyvitamin D level: 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L in the UK, Australia etc.) which is 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass. This is what is measured in "vitamin D" blood tests.
This level is higher than what most doctors think is necessary, because they are only aiming to attain what is needed for proper kidney function regarding regulating calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism: 20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L).
The scarily high sounding "5000 IUs" per day is a gram every 22 years - and pharma grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram.
If everyone supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently to attain at least the 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs to work properly, then there would be numerous benefits, including:
1 - Little or no pandemic spread of COVID-19, including current more infectious variants, even in a population which had no immunity to SARS-CoV-2 due to prior infection or vaccination. Handwashing and not breathing, sneezing or coughing into most other people's faces are always good ideas, but there would be no need for masks, social distancing, lockdowns, real vaccines (Novavax) or the quasi-vaccine gene-therapy injections (Pfizer and Moderna mRNA - and AstraZeneca and J&J adenovirus vector).
There would be many fewer infected people, primarily due to each infected person having a less severe disease and so shedding fewer viruses. R0 would be below the pandemic level of 1.0 in almost all circumstances - the possible exceptions being people in confined spaces such as hospitals or submarines. Those infected would much more rarely need hospitalisation or die, assuming that inexpensive, generally safe, effective, treatments such as ivermectin were used in hospitals, or for outpatients with, or at significant risk of developing, serious symptoms.
2 - Likewise influenza and other infectious diseases, including pertussis (whooping cough).
3 - Greatly reduced rates of sepsis, which killed about 11 million people worldwide in 2017.
4 - Reduced risk of in-utero, peri-natal and neurodevelopmental problems including low birth weight, pre-eclampsia, autism, intellectual disability schizophrenia and ADHD: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2.
5 - *Greatly* reduced risk of neurodegenerative disease: Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, multiple system atrophy, Alzheimer's disease etc.: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3.
6 - Reduced risk and severity of numerous inflammatory auto-immune diseases.
(1 of 2) Thanks very much for this article. Some, perhaps most, vaccines or quasi-vaccines are over-rated.
(The mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 injections are not vaccines according to long-standing definitions, since they do not provide an antigen to stimulate an immune response. They are gene therapies, by the EU definition, since they use genetic techniques to program human cells to generate facsimiles of the viral spike protein. These protein molecules are the antigens which stimulate the immune response, which destroy each such cell and, ideally, builds long-lasting immunity against viruses which have similar spike proteins on their surface.)
For instance, robust research, including Anderson et al. 2020 https://sci-hub.se/10.7326/M19-3075 shows that influenza vaccination does not reduce hospitalisation or death due to influenza or other respiratory diseases in 65 year olds. Due to a government campaign, the proportion of people in England and Wales who take the annual influenza vaccine jumps from 27% at age 64 to 57% at age 66. Yet there is no corresponding step change in hospitalisation or death. Both hospitalisation and death rise smoothly with age. See the graphs at: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/influenza-vaccines-do-not-reduce and discussion of further research at: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/influenza-vaccines-do-not-reduce-1da.
See also Igor Chudov's article https://www.igor-chudov.com/p/influenza-vaccine-is-perfect-example on influenza vaccine effectiveness. Even by their dodgy methods of calculating this, since there are no placebo-controlled randomized controlled trial, the VE figures are modestly positive and negative, with a very wide range of uncertainty. Here with their 95% confidence ranges in brackets, are the supposed percentages of effectiveness (positive is protective, negative increases the risk of hospitalization):
+11% (-19 to +33%) To 18 years.
+26% (-14 to +52%) 18 - 64 years.
-3% (-54 to +31%) 65+ years.
This protection was described as "low to non-significant".
We can easily tell that the authorities, with many medical professionals following their guidance, are either knowingly lying to us, or at least are egregiously ignorant of the best research, regarding the actual protection afforded by these influenza vaccines, which they recommend annually for everyone of 6 months age or more.
We the public rightfully expects all these supposed experts, whose salaries we pay, to be honest about the risks and benefits of all the medical interventions they are responsible for. We shouldn't have to read research articles ourselves to find out the truth.
This condition of systematic over-promotion of vaccines in general (I guess some are genuinely safe enough, effective and worth taking for at least some subset of the population) persists in large part due to the failings of the majorities of whole professions, worldwide: medical professionals, vaccinologists, virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, public health officials, academic publishers and the mainstream media.
This decades-old cult of overly estimating the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is also driven, directly, by many people - probably the majority of the public - hoping and choosing to believe that their immune systems can be significantly strengthened, for each specific disease, by a small, symbolically painful and so sacrificial, steely injection by a member of the medical priesthood, of a fluid devised by team of PhDs working for great international corporations, produced by high-tech methods in precisely controlled conditions.
Far too many people regard any challenge to their cherished, faith based (they don't read the research) belief in the value of vaccines as an attempt to increase "vaccine hesitancy". What they really want is for everyone to get *vaccinated*. The word is often pronounced with maximum emphasis, as if it is a singular and overridingly beneficial *good* - and indeed a public *duty* by which each person can prevent themselves from carrying a pernicious disease which is likely to infect other people.
Far too many people dismiss those questioning the vaccinophilic orthodoxy as troublemakers - those who shirk, and encourage other to shirk, their responsibility to society, which is to get *vaccinated* as experts recommend.
This siding with the corrupted so-called experts blinds many people to the seriousness of the situation, which would take a very long description, but which includes corruption of government and the medical profession, billions of dollars spent researching infectious diseases - all of which would be less of a problem if everyone supplemented enough vitamin D3 for their immune systems to work properly (see my second comment and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/) - with some of that research leading to gain of function work on viruses, which in one instance at least *caused* a pandemic of worldwide disastrous proportions: SARS-CoV-2 -> COVID-19. https://vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/
Furthermore, this corrupted interlocked system of researchers, pharmaceutical companies and others has for four years covered up the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2. They argue that the virus arose from zoonotic transfer, and so argue that *more* virological research, including gain of function research, is required to prepare humanity for future pandemics (they imply that all pandemics of novel pathogens result from zoonotic transfer). A key part of their argument and belief in the urgency of such research is their belief that the best, or only, way of tackling such pandemics is **vaccination** - and that all this research is necessary to the rapid development and deployment of vaccines.
Until recently I had believed that it was our duty, as adults, to be vaccinated against pertussis, partly to protect ourselves, but most importantly to prevent ourselves from infecting newborns and infants who were at serious risk of harm or death from this disease, and who were too young to be vaccinated.
Now I have learned that while this may have been true of the cellular pertussis vaccines, that these were abandoned over a decade ago due to the harm and death they inflicted on some children (adults as well?) and that the new acellular pertussis vaccine is well known, by researchers at least, to be ineffective at stopping transmission. For instance, from Warfel et al. 2013, "Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model" https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1314688110 .
Now we learn that these acellular vaccines not only do little or nothing to stop transmission from an infected person, or to stop a person from being infected, but that they may increase transmission by increasing the chance of infection and/or by increasing severity and/or that the infection may be asymptomatic, so the infected person does not know to isolate themselves.
Since these so-called experts, deliberately or out of ignorance, systematically mislead the public about the risks and benefits of both influenza and pertussis vaccines, and since they have done so spectacularly with the mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 so-called vaccines, there is no reason to trust, on face value, anything they tell the public about vaccines, infectious diseases or any other health matter.
This leaves us in the unfortunate position of having to do our own research in fields which are complex and contentious, in order to protect ourselves firstly from the diseases in question and from the frequently harmful interventions which the so-called experts recommend we accept and pay for.
I'm in my fifties and recently went in for a medical check-up. The doctor said it was time for me to get a tetanus shot (interestingly, he didn't push the Covid shot). I said no thanks, and he replied that I could get scratched by a twig in my backyard and get tetanus (I was thinking, oh really now). Later he pushed the shot again and said it would also protect me from pertussis. Not something that had ever crossed my mind to worry over.