International Panel of Medical Experts Urges U.S. Government to Stop Ignoring Intravenous Vitamin C As a Promising Option to Treat COVID-19

International Panel of Medical Experts Urges U.S. Government to Stop Ignoring Intravenous Vitamin C As a Promising Option to Treat COVID-19

Studies in Korea and the United States and ongoing trials in Canada and China suggest high doses of Vitamin C in patients admitted to the ICU with sepsis, including COVID-19 patients, could be the difference between life and death.

A new paper reveals promising results from the use of intravenous (IV) treatment of ascorbate or ascorbic acid — better known as Vitamin C — for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

The Journal, Global Advances in Health and Medicine, published the paper titled “Ascorbate as Prophylaxis and Therapy for COVID-19 — Update From Shanghai and U.S. Medical Institutions” by Richard Z Cheng, MD; Mikhail Kogan, MD; and Devra Davis, PhD. 

This paper is online at  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2164956120934768

“Given preliminary data, intravenous high-dose Vitamin C may be a life-saving treatment for patients with COVID-19 and could provide an extremely safe and low-cost treatment option that can be scaled immediately for worldwide use,” said co-author Dr. Mikhail Kogan, medical director of George Washington University’s Center for Integrative Medicine. 

Dr Kogan adds that “It is imperative that Vitamin C be assessed in quality randomized trials. Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to not be interested in financing such a trial. It is unethical to ignore growing evidence of the efficacy of IV Vitamin C and deny funding of a definitive trial.”

“Were reliable nontoxic treatments such as the use of ascorbate validated for this novel virus, this would greatly facilitate the return to a new normal for medicine and for civil society,” said Dr. Davis, president of the Environmental Health Trust. “While our findings are not definitive, they provide an important indication that there could be means to reduce mortality, along with the use of dexamethasone for advanced cases. It is imperative that these findings be taken seriously given the lack of alternative means for limiting deaths from this highly infectious pandemic agent.” 

The authors report that a specialized interdisciplinary panel of medical experts in Shanghai and Guangzhou, China, in March advised treating physicians to expand clinical uses of ingested ascorbate for prophylaxis and higher dose intravenous (IV) therapy for COVID-19 and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), along with other supportive therapies, including Vitamin D and zinc.

The use of Vitamin C, a relatively low-cost and nontoxic treatment, “should be considered an important option in light of the growing impact COVID-19 is having on public health and the global economy,” said Richard Cheng, MD, PhD, first author of the report who is an American currently living in Shanghai.

Dr. Cheng is working with Chinese experts in Wuhan, Shanghai, and Beijing, who are carrying out the largest clinical trial of Vitamin C in history aimed at reducing deaths from COVID.  

For decades Vitamin C has been known to help people with the common cold to ARDS to sepsis, which is caused by a flood of inflammatory bacterial and viral pathogens. 

Cytokine storms, the explosion of free radicals that damage the body’s important biological molecules, is a prime cause of mortality among COVID-19 patients. Cytokine storms lead to uncontrolled inflammation, oxidative injury, and damage to the alveolar-capillary barrier, with secondary bacterial infection. 

COVID-19 patients with infections are generally found to have depleted levels of Vitamin C in their systems.

“We need to stay vigilant and the social distancing, personal protective measures are essential, but don’t forget to focus on individual health and individual nutritional immunity,” Dr. Cheng said. “It’s cheap. It’s effective, and it’s not being talked about enough despite its successful past use in the treatment of other viral infections, including viruses similar to SARS-Cov2 like SARS and MERS.”

The article recounts that in March 2020, high-dose IV administration successfully treated 50 moderate to severe COVID-19 patients in Shanghai, China. Doses ranged from 2g to 10g per day, given over a period of eight to 10 hours, for five to seven days. For this group of recent patients, the oxygenation index improved in real time and all were discharged from intensive care and released from the hospital as of March 23, 2020. Doctors in the United States and Korea reported similar outcomes.

High-dose ascorbate has been clinically used for decades with few serious side effects, except in limited cases of carriers of G6PD, a genetic blood disorder most frequently found in males.  

The doctors acknowledge that more randomized clinical trials will further validate the effectiveness of Vitamin C but stressed that during an exponentially “growing pandemic where more than a quarter of all children who are positive for COVID-19 have few or no symptoms and many transmitters of the disease are asymptomatic,” innovative approaches are needed to prevent and treat the disease.

This paper is online at  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2164956120934768

https://ehtrust.org/international-panel-of-medical-experts-urges-u-s-government-to-stop-ignoring-intravenous-vitamin-c-as-a-promising-option-to-treat-covid-19/ Source: Environmental Health Trust