Vitamin D for Preventing Covid: Hype or Hope?: Shots – Health News | Hacker News Reader

Vitamin D for Preventing Covid: Hype or Hope?: Shots – Health News

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18 pointsevo_97 comments

I first read about the vitimin D observation about a year ago. Since then my wife, daughter, and son, have all made sure to take supplements. I've also read about about famotidine, aspirin, and melatonin being related to those with less or almost or no side effects. None of us have been infected yet.

Both my wife and I got the first jab of the Pfizer vaccine with no side effects at all aside from a bit of soreness where the jab was. My wife got her 2nd shot almost two weeks ago and had no side effects at all. I got my 2nd shot about 5 hours ago and none yet for me (but it's still too early to say I won't).

I think it's fair to say taking those before you get the jab can't hurt. (famotidine is an over the counter heartburn remedy and I'm pretty sure should only be taken once a week at most).

All of the studies I've read on all of these do not conclude anything other than those who had it in their systems at recommended levels generally had less severe to no severe reactions to the infection and the vaccines.

https://vitamindforall.org/letter.html argues on the other side. There's an impressive list of researchers taking it.

If it eventually proves ineffective in preventing or mitigating Covid-19, you're out a few bucks if you were taking it.

If you delay taking vitamin D until enough peer reviewed studies develop a final consensus in the years to come, it may turn out that you and/or family members missed out on a protective measure.

There remains a significant probability that you might get infected before you get optimal immunity some weeks after finally receiving a full course of vaccination.

Many are now learning that the development of knowledge can be an uncertain, contentious and uncertain process, especially in a rapidly evolving situation.

How is it that we vaccines we're confident are effective, but haven't been able to draw a conclusion on this, yet?

The vaccines are extremely effective so it's easy to see that in studies. It's harder to determine the difference between a small effect and no effect. If vitamin d was as effective as the vaccines we would certainly know by now. (It's fairly likely that it's just a spurious correlation by now, but it's hard to completely rule out the possibility that vitamin d has any effect.)

“Relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction measures in the evaluation of clinical trial data are poorly understood by health professionals and the public. The absence of reported absolute risk reduction in COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials can lead to outcome reporting bias that affects the interpretation of vaccine efficacy. The present article uses clinical epidemiologic tools to critically appraise reports of efficacy in Pfzier/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccine clinical trials. Based on data reported by the manufacturer for Pfzier/BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2, this critical appraisal shows: relative risk reduction, 95.1%; 95% CI, 90.0% to 97.6%; p = 0.016; absolute risk reduction, 0.7%...”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996517/

Absolute risk reduction is naturally going to be low in vaccine trials if we don't intentionally infect all the participants with covid-19.

I get the need for the absolute risk reduction number but it would seem to me the only way to find that is to know how many who've been vaccinated have been exposed to the virus afterwards, or to purposely expose them.

It would seem that could take some time to get accurate results for the general population. And then we also have the variants of the virus to deal with too.

Finally, I don't have any real perspective on the "absolute risk reduction, 0.7%" number in relation to other vaccines. It sounds very low, but the article doesn't offer comparisons to other vaccines.

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