Studies that show no evidence of a particular phenomenon tend not to get the same degree of publicity that studies showing something do – but it’s great that scientists are making the effort to determine if a particular correlation is a result of causation. The conclusion of this study is that Europeans (people with other ancestry were not covered in the study) with naturally high levels of Vitamin D don’t suffer less from Covid 19 than those without. Regardless, it’s still not a bad idea to take Vitamin D supplements for other health benefits.
Not all studies are correlational. There is a small Spanish RCT that showed quite phenomenal results: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7456194/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7456194/</a>
Here's the paper: <a href="https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/early/2021/01/07/bmjnph-2020-000151.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/early/2021/01/07/bm...</a><p>Essentially, they appear to have used stratification on genetic factors to reduce potential confounders and improve their ability to get a less biased estimate.<p>This seems reasonably solid to me, from a brief overview of the methods section (I'm not an expert though, so there may be flaws I missed).<p>Definitely some countervailing evidence against Vit-D being <i>directly</i> related. There's almost certainly some third factor between Vit-D and health, but we don't yet have a good sense for what that might be.<p>Note that the study is only analysing data for White British individuals, so if you are of a different ethnicity there may still be hope for you ;)
Actual text. <a href="https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2021/01/07/bmjnph-2020-000151.full" rel="nofollow">https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2021/01/07/bmjnph-20...</a><p>The analysis is a mess. Why can't they put it in a Google Colab notebook to check their calcuations?
There really needs to be a proper big trial conducted on this. There's too much evidence pointing to a possible link between Vitamin D supplements and better Covid outcomes for people with Vitamin D deficiency to dismiss it based on one meta-study.
When I heard the original report on vitamin d deficiency and getting seriously ill from COVID, my first thought was people who have sedentary lives tend not to be outdoors been active.<p>I’ll add an assumption that this may also follow with another correlation that diabetics suffer more from COVID for perhaps the same sedentary reasons.<p>Might be nonsense but correlation doesn’t have to mean cause - arguing against myself and bad science.<p>Any opinions from a clinician?