How's it going, everyone? In today's podcast, Dr. J is looking at how we can help quench that inflammation and how to address low Vitamin D levels knowing that the Coronavirus is causing a lot of inflammation in the lungs. Dr. J is honing in on antioxidants, Vitamin C, glutathione (which will help with electrolytes), and Vitamin D as an immunomodulator (which gives us a better, more intelligent immune response). And what lowers our Vitamin D levels? Lack of sunlight is a big one. If you've been indoors almost 24/7, you're probably not getting enough Vitamin D and this is crucial for physical and mental health. The Coronavirus cannot survive outside in direct sunlight with at least 40% humidity for more than a minute, so going out into your own backyard or walking along the sidewalk while keeping six feet away from any passerbys won't hurt you, it'll help you get in some Vitamin D, get some fresh air into those lungs, increase your physical movement, and more!
Dr. J and Dr. Evan Brand also look at Coronavirus case fatality by age, lending us more perspective to help lessen stress. Still, Dr. J encourages you to try and get in the foundational nutrients and minerals to strengthen your immune system: Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin D (5000 IUs), glutathione or NaC, and Zinc (30-50mg/day).
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
5:15 Why we need to go outside
07:21 Age brackets of coronavirus cases
10:43 Analyzing online data and stats
17:42 Vitamin D correlation
30:56 Vitamin C levels given to coronavirus patients
39:11 About the coronavirus vaccine
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, guys. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here really happy to be back. We got a fabulous podcast on deck for you today. We’ll be chatting about the correlation and potential causation between low vitamin D and COVID-19/coronavirus infection and symptoms. Evan, how are we doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Doing very well. We got off of this topic for a couple of weeks to go back to some other regular stuff but considering this is still going on—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Evan Brand: There are still everybody on the planet wearing masks everywhere they go and places are still shut down and a lady in Dallas is getting put in jail for trying to open her salon to feed her kids. I felt that it was important for us to discuss some of these things that are coming out in the literature. Things that should be the headlines but they are not the headlines because they don’t involve death directly and they are free mostly or very cheap to implement like vitamin C and vitamin D. So why don’t we go straight into this one paper that you had just sent me over, the one that was titled, “Can Early and High Intravenous Dose of vitamin C Prevent and Treat Coronavirus?” from Dr. Chang because this is pretty, pretty awesome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me set table for everyone here first. Okay? So most of the mainstream, kinda conventional approach is to what is going on with coronavirus are very defensive measures, right? Washing your hands, wearing a mask, okay, right? Maybe some social distancing. Maybe quarantine. These are all kinda common sense, you know, defensive measures that are put in place. There aren’t really a lot of offensive measures, right? So we wanna take the time today and just look at some of the things that are in the literature now that there is some evidence out. Maybe it’s correlation. Maybe it’s causation. Again, to actually have causation you need a lot of money and studies, so that probably will never happen but we can use knowledge guided by experience to extrapolate the correlation and apply it and see how it works from n equals 1 standpoint applied in your life. So we are excited to talk about that. Some of the things that we are lining up here are in regards to vitamin D and vitamin C and some of the data on that and the mechanism really is we know inflammation is being caused especially in the lungs by these infections. We know an increase in cytokines can also be produced. Cytokines are these inflammatory chemical messengers that happen as a result of your immune system and/or the inflammation caused by the virus, and so what happens is your body needs things to kinda help quench the inflammation. So there are antioxidants. We call them redox components, right? Vitamin C is in that pathway, so is glutathione. They really help quench and they help give off electrons to deal with and neutralize inflammation, and then there are also nutrients like vitamin D that are immunomodulators. They modulate the immune system and by modulating the immune system, we can have a better, more intelligent immune response, less maybe internal cytokine production. We can also make natural antimicrobial peptides like cathelicidin and others that can really help knock down even the infection as well, because vitamin D helps modulate that Th1, Th2 immune response. So if we have a healthier immune response, it’s theoretically we can go after and deal with the infection. We know the infection rates are—I went over the data last week. A lot of anecdotal, I shouldn’t even say anecdotal, but a lot of the early antibody testing, for instance, Triumph Foods plant here up in Kansas City, I saw 353 workers tested positive for coronavirus, all 100% of them had no symptoms. They did a 3300-patient study for the jails, for the federal jails, 3300 patients had coronavirus. They tested them antibody-wise, 96% had no symptoms, alright? They did study up in Santa Barbara or LA area and they did a study up in Stanford/Santa Clara area, 50 times plus the amount of people that had the infection actually had antibodies. So we know this is not a hallmark of a, let’s say a very virulent infection, and Evan will go over the data looking at the ages. We see a lot of people that are younger are really not really coming down with it. So that’s important to note and the CDC even said from age 0-17, the flu is actually far more severe than the coronavirus on our young people.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so I wanna comment on one thing. I’ll talk about the age in a second but I just wanna point out one thing you said which is that we are finding the infection rate is 50 to 80 times greater than originally thought. Meaning when you look at all these numbers, oh, 1 new case here, 1 new case there. That’s like headline but the reality is way more people are infected than we even know like we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg just based on some of the antibody testing coming out and what we’re finding is I don’t wanna exaggerate it but based on these numbers that are saying 96% plus in these big groups, almost everybody has it or has had it and they’re already making antibodies towards it. So I wanna –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well…
Evan Brand: Point that out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ll just say we need about 60% to get really this herd immunity level where it’s hard to pass it around. Like if every other person has antibodies for it, it becomes very difficult to pass it around. So over time, most people will get it, right? You know, you can't—unless you’re gonna totally be in quarantine forever, which I think actually negatively impacts your immune system. It may make you more susceptible to having more symptoms and succumbing of the virus. I think even if you’re older and you have comorbidities, you should still be outside and having reasonable social distancing. Remember, the virus can’t live more than a minute in 75-degree temperature, 40% humidity, only a couple of minutes because we know UVC light kills the virus. We know that. It’s a national disinfectant. So if you are older and you have those comorbidities, you should be outside getting fresh air, you should be getting vitamin D and still keep your distance if you’re concerned, but you should still be outside. Staying inside is not healthy. They did a study up at New York City and they found 60% of people that came in with the infection actually had quarantined. So the quarantine thing is not what it is playing out to be. I think there is more risk factors in that and how it impacts your immune system just staying inside too long.
Evan Brand: Yeah, explain that. It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I was quarantined for the last month. I didn’t go anywhere but yet you still got the virus somehow” I thought quarantine was the magic remedy. You know—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I think moving—
Evan Brand: So how are these people getting it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think moving is a big thing. I think getting fresh air, I think getting vitamin D and sunlight, I think just being outside does something. You know, we talk about it with—you mentioned in the past with forest bathing how it impacts cortisol levels and helps your immune system. I forget what’s the term for forest bathing? What’s it?
Evan Brand: Yeah, shinrin-yoku.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And it boosts your NK killer cells, too. They found that even—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Evan Brand: Like a 2- to 3-day camping trip in the woods boosted up the NK killer cells which are anti-cancer and many other benefit for a month. So 2 days boosted the immune system up over 50% for a month. So this age thing, you and I talked about this before but you were looking at some Italy stuff and the average age of someone who had a fatality from it was 81 years old, and so we have this picture here from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Korea Center for Disease Control and on and on and on, and long story short, when you’re looking at someone 0 to 9 years old, 0% fatality rate overall; 10 to 19 years old for most countries, 0% overall. It’s not until you really get into the 30-39-year-old, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, that you even break above 0 and then you’re getting into 0.1% in the 30-39 group, 0.3% in Spain for 40 to 49-year-olds, 50 to 59-year-old 0.4%. So still, just really tiny numbers. You don’t get in 'til the—until your 80 plus years old that you’re getting into a 13% plus fatality rate and even then, we know with Dr. Birx who came on TV and said, “Hey, all of the cases that could possibly be related are still gonna be tagged as COVID until further research and then maybe we’ll go back and adjust those numbers later.” So how many 81-year-olds are dying that just happen to have the coronavirus in their system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m not sure if you caught it over the weekend. Dr. Birx said—she was commenting about the head of the CDC. She said that there could be up to 25% incorrect on the CDC data points on the COVID-19 deaths/diagnosis. So she commented that over the weekend which is interesting. I wanna share some data here on screen just to kind of bolster the things that you’re saying. So if you guys are listening to this, you can always jump on the Youtube link as well to get some more information. So here’s the study that Evan was showing here, looking at corona case fatality rates by age. So you can see here 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, so I mean you’re at looking at very minuscule percentage points here, right? Very minuscule percentage points, 30-39 and then it starts really going up significantly once you get into 60-79 but even that, I mean, really it’s 70 and 80 is where it really goes up. You still only have a chance, you know, a 1% to 2% chance in the 60-69, right? Yeah.
Evan Brand: Well, let me point this out, too, real quick while you got that up which is that the percentages are actually gonna be lower than what is showing here because these numbers are based on confirmed cases. So confirmed cases, confirmed death. So if there’s many other people that have had it, they might not even show up here. So, if you know what I’m saying, so on their website. This is a world data website. They’re saying you can’t even take these numbers and really publicly talk about them too much because we haven’t had enough testing. So once we do get tested, let’s say we tested another hundred thousand people and put them in that pool, those death rates would be way, way, way, way lower. Those are confirmed cases and then confirmed deaths. So, basically how many other people are out there that have it haven’t gotten tested and therefore, their numbers don’t get factored in. So it makes it look worse than it even is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So here are the coronavirus deaths from last week, okay? And so how it works is this. You have the top numbers the deaths, the bottom numbers the case. So you divide the top number by the bottom number and then you get a percentage, okay? That’s how you figure out the mortality rate. So when Evan talks about this, this data here is if there are more cases than we know about, right? That makes the denominator the bottom number bigger, right? And what we’re finding is, the cases are actually getting far more bigger because of the fact the asymptomatics. The data is showing a 50X asymptomatic being present. Looking at the Stanford study, they show data there and up at the study up in Chelsea, Mass. in Boston. Study down in the UCLA area. USC did a study. So there’s about 3 to 5 different studies on this already out there. I did a video on this last Friday on my Youtube channel. We’ll put that video in the description so you can go dive into that. So the data’s there. Now, we do know here. This came from Italy. Right here, this study here. It only bolstered what we talked about so you can see it came from a government agency, Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Even though my last name is Marchegiani, I don’t really speak the best Italian. So—
Evan Brand: I had a lady—I actually had a client go, “Yeah, I like listening to you and that Italian guy.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You got it. I gotta brush up on my Italian, right?
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But in general, you can see number 1. It primarily came in 2 major areas here. Right about 60 what, 69%. It came in 2 major areas. There’s a reason why two 2 areas were hit really hard. I can go into it briefly but Lombardi is a big area where there’s a lot of textiles produced there. So a lot of Italian textiles are produced, right? China bought a lot of companies. Italian clothing companies, brand companies, and instead of making it in China, they wanted to keep the Made in Italy type of logo and branding on there, so they fly a lot of Chinese up here to these areas to work on the products in the textile industry in the mills. So part of the reason why these areas were hit so hard is there was a flow of Chinese up here to go work in the textiles. So that’s a big reason why, not to mention there is a just a lot of elderly population up there. Now, let’s look at the data. So if you go down a little bit lower. You could see the average age is a little bit over 80. About 80, 81-ish, and then when you look at the people that actually die, I mean, look you don’t really have an increase until you get in the 60s. I mean, look at that. So this is the deaths here and you can see men are actually being hit, about two-thirds are men and one-third are women, and you don’t have an increase in women until you get to up 90+. That’s probably because most of the men are already dead by then. So you can see that spread right there and then look at the diagnosis, right? So this is interesting because they break down more percent of people had what disease that died of COVID. Now, when you go down at the bottom, a number of comorbidities. Look at this, 3 or more comorbidities, 61%. That is unbelievable. So there—what’s being put, portrayed in the media is that this is an infection that could just take anyone down, right? No matter what. No, that’s not the case. Not even close. The data does not support that. Now, when we actually put reason, logic, and evidence here, there’s a lot less fear guiding people. This is a disease that’s gonna take primarily elderly people, people that have multiple comorbidities. Now is it possible that you’re gonna see a news article with someone who is 20 or 29 passing? Yeah, I mean 0.2% in China, 0.22% in Spain, 0 in Italy, right? Once you hit 30-39, then you had 0.3%. Is it possible someone from this age category could die? Yeah, it’s very possible. You don’t know what their comorbidity status is. There’s HIPAA laws in the United States so, you’re not gonna see reporters saying, “Hey, this person was a type 2 diabetic. Hey, this person eats processed food. Hey, this person whatever.” You’re not gonna get that data. So it’s easy for people to be like, “Ooh, I’m so scared. It’s attacking people that are in their 30s.” You just don’t know about that person and obviously, you don’t even know if the person they’re putting up on screen is even in the last couple of years or their most relevant decade. A lot of times they are notorious for showing younger pictures of people that have passed. That’s pretty common. So I just wanna lay out the data and just look at, you know, what these statistical norms are for these infections so people can get a perspective, and then part of the correlation and why it’s older people is number one, you have had more time to accumulate a disease because the bad habits compounded over time is what creates diseases, right? And then also, certain nutrients like vitamin C and vitamin D go down over age and we’ll look at the data in a second on that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you did good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It is here.
Evan Brand: No, I’m glad you pointed out the three—the comorbidities and over 61% of the deaths and I’m glad you showed for people that are just listening, that’s okay. You’re not missing out on much. We’re just talking about the numbers here, so hopefully it makes sense. But the hysteria math versus the reality math, I really like that you put that together because once you talk about the—which really you did even put what’s coming out now. You put on here there’s 50X asymptomatic. Now, we’re seeing it could even be 80X asymptomatic but the real death rate with your 50X asymptomatic math is showing a 0.01 death rate versus if we go up to 80, I mean, it’s gonna be even smaller than 0.01 deaths.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this is less than the flu already by the way. So the numbers are, just so you’ll understand. Hysteria math is not understanding the full breadth of the case, okay? So not understanding the full population—the extent to which people are affected across the board because the asymptomatics prevent people from being tested that have no symptoms, right?
Evan Brand: Well, can we—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They’re not gonna go to the hospital.
Evan Brand: Now, let me ask you. Let me ask you this real quick, too, based on what you said over the weekend happened. So you’re saying that the hysteria math is even gonna be cut down by 25% now, is that right? Because of what Birx was saying?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. Yup, I’ll pull that article up here in a second. But that is what is showing here as well. The hysteria math may even be cut down more and there’s 2 different diagnostics codes. I’ve already talked about it in the past but the hysteria math, the diagnostics codes are U07.1, U07.2. Let me pull this up here as we chat. This will hopefully help you guys out. It will give you a little bit more info here. I’m gonna help you guys out on this, okay?
Evan Brand: And while you’re doing that, let’s talk about what the whole point of today is, so we can’t spend all day on the stats but what people really want to hear is that, well, I think we covered a lot of which one here, which is that the numbers just are not adding up to what is happening in society, with police arresting people, and you know, using helicopters, the surveillance speech, and they’ve talked about these contact tracer programs and apps to track people, and all that. Just weird 1984-style stuff. But what we’re seeing in some of these new papers here and this is more, as you mentioned, correlation. This is not necessarily low vitamin D causes blank, but we’re finding that if someone has a level of 30—30 ng, it’s gonna be ng/mL but if you get a standard vitamin D test, just look at your number, 25(OH )is what you’re gonna look at on your blood work. There’s little to no death at all occurring if the vitamin D is above 30. So if you’re vitamin D is above 30, if you get it, chances are it’s gonna be mild to moderate at most. All the major, major, major numbers of death, those had very, very, very low vitamin D. You’re talking a level of 10, a level of 20. Those are people that are ending up in real trouble. So the mean serum, 25(OH)D level in the critical cases was the lowest. The highest in the mild cases. So when I’m saying this, it sounds confusing like I’m just thinking of someone driving their car listening to this. It may sounds confusing. So I’m trying to make it as simple as possible. High vitamin D, more mild. Low vitamin D, more severe. It’s basically that simple.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. And then, here’s an article by Washington Post right here. So during the task force meeting on Wednesday, heated discussion broke out between Deborah Birx from the physician administration and Robert Redfield, he is the director of the CDC. Birx and others were frustrated with the CDC’s antiquated system of tracking virus data which they worried was inflating some statistics such as mortality rate and case counts by as much as 25%, according to 4 people present for the discussion. Two senior administration officials said the discussion was not heated. So we have this 25% number that is interestingly popping up. So I just—I wanted to highlight that and then here’s some of data here briefly I wanted to highlight more than 370 workers at a pork plant in Missouri tested positive, right? We go down here and look at the data. What do they say? All of them were asymptomatic. All were asymptomatic, okay? We go here and look at the—in 4 US state prisons, nearly 3300 inmates tested positive for coronavirus, 96% without symptoms, okay? Now, let me just be clear. Asymptomatic means you develop an immune response. You develop antibodies. You are infectious for 2 weeks or so on average. The infection is no longer shedding after about 2 weeks on average. You have antibodies and now more than likely you won’t be able to get sick for years. Now, we go to the USC study, similar, similar thing here. USC study, they found that the estimate 28 to 55 times higher in the antibodies versus the confirmed cases, okay? We have a study here, Science Magazine, similar type of category here. On this thing here, this I think is looking at Germany though. I think this is up in Europe and the same thing, I had it highlighted here earlier. I will have to come back to this one.
Evan Brand: Well, I saw one thing at the top there where it said that the infection rate was 30% higher. I saw that near the top of that article. It was talking about Germany and did it say Netherlands as well? Yeah, there it goes. Survey results Netherlands, Germany, several locations in the US find that anywhere from 2 to 30% of certain populations have already been infected with it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Yup, exactly. There is an actual number down here. I had it highlighted earlier but, let’s see here, 99% false positive—
Evan Brand: There’s a—are you talking about the paragraph right there at the top?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Here it is. There it is, right there. That’s more than 50 times as many viral gene test had confirmed and implies a low fatality rate. So 50 times the amount of viral—meaning there are 50 times more people that had the antibodies than the viral gene test had confirmed. That’s what I’m saying there. So 50 times more people had antibodies which showed previous infection that were actually testing positive for the infection. And then the Guardian right here, coronavirus antibody study in the California, right here in the county here at the high end, was 85 times, okay? 85 times, right there.
Evan Brand: And people are listening and they’re like, “Wait a second. What are you saying? 85 times?” That the infection rate is 85 times higher than previously thought.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For every 1 person that test positive with this PCR-DNA swab, they take the little swab, they put it to the back of your nose and hit the back of your throat, you test positive, right? So when I say 50 times, that means that there are 50 other people that never had the infection symptomatically that are testing serologically positive for it. Meaning they have an immune response showing that they got exposed to the infection. Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: It does. But when people hear that, they go, “Oh my God! Well, 50 times more people are infected, well, I need to stay away from humans ever. Don’t hug your mother for Mother’s Day.” Those were some of the headlines.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, that means that this virus is not as virulent as we thought it is. And maybe—so contagious is meaning, it is easy to spread, right? I think the virus is very contagious. It is easiness to spread. That’s the R-nought number, right? The virulence is how the strong the infection is, right? So you have like a virus like Ebola, it kills 40% of people that it comes in contact with. That’s strong virulence. Ebola, not that contagious. I think it only spread to a couple of thousand people. So usually, in kind of virus world, there tends to be a correlation with the more virulent the virus, the stronger and the more chance that it can kill you, usually the less contagious it is. Now, you have the Spanish flu of 1918, right? Why was that a big deal? Well, we didn’t have antibiotics, right? So there’s a lot of post-viral secondary pneumonia that happens that if you don’t have antibiotics then a lot of times that’s the pneumonia that kills you. Not to mention we had a second wave in 1918 because of people coming back, soldiers coming back from World War 1 in Germany that re-brought back the infection. Not to mention I don’t think we really had a lot of the good sterile things like—we didn’t really have a lot of the hygiene things kinda fully dialed in back then either, and I know there were big, huge changes when they started doing hospitals outside and getting more vitamins. That also made a huge game change there as well.
Evan Brand: Well, good point. I’m really glad that you pointed out that there is the issue of virulence versus how easy it can spread and those often get conflated together. Those 2 things get kinda fused and mended. So the media will make it appear that it is extremely virulent but it could just be low virulence, high contagion. And that’s—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Evan Brand: That doesn’t sell as many newspaper articles or ad clicks or whatever else.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. I wanted to put a couple of studies that came out recently out there. Vitamin D supplementation could possibly improve clinical outcomes of patients infected with coronavirus. Now, these are observational studies, okay? Meaning they didn’t do a clinical control. They didn’t put—they didn’t do someone in a metabolic ward, gave him a virus and then gave him vitamin D, and then did the same thing to another group and gave them the virus and no vitamin D, and randomized it. That’s like the double-blind placebo control study. That’s not this. This is observational and there’s always the healthy user bias. What’s the healthy user bias? The healthy user bias is people that take care of themselves and do the right thing and drink good water and get some sleep and move, and may also have good vitamin D, right? So then people that have good vitamin D, they may be doing a lot of other things right that keep them healthy. And so we may be seeing that in here, so it’s always possible. But in the study, I’ll just put it up here and then people always ask like, “What’s the link? What’s the link?” Right here. This is the link, okay? That’s the link right there. We’ll try to put the links in below the video as well. Let’s look at the study. Let me just go right down to the conclusion. The results suggest that an increase in serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D level in the body could either improve clinical outcome or mitigate the severe critical outcomes. While a decrease in the serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D level could worsen clinical outcomes. In conclusion, this study provides substantial information to clinical—to clinicians and help policymakers. Vitamin D supplementation could possibly improve clinical outcomes of patients infected with COVID-19. Further research should conduct randomized controlled trials in larger population studies to evaluate recommendations. That’s I think very powerful right there.
Evan Brand: And let me just point this was the same stuff that just a month ago people were getting flagged as fake news and videos were removed and whatever else and people were saying this early on, vitamin D, vitamin C, you and I were saying this and not us directly, but others had been told that this was like misinformation and whatever. No, I mean, it’s coming out more and more to be true and it makes total sense. We knew that from the beginning. It’s just good to have some papers to back it up now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah and basically, the cut off was vitamin D status below 30 ng/mL was associated with more severe disease and mortality in the Southeast Asian study, okay? And then in general, one study gave adequate stats was 31.2. So basically, when you went above 30 or 35, things definitely improved. So levels above 34 is associated with an improvement. So that was kinda the general gist. So that’s just kinda highlighting that there and then if we can go here to this study, vitamin D level of mild and severe in elderly cases they found here most male and female subjects had 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels below 30. Also, most of the subjects with pre-existing conditions had 25-hydroxy vitamin D level below 30. So now the question here is, well, is it because they are sick and unhealthy? Now they have a harder time getting outside and getting vitamin D. So maybe the diseases are also causing them to have lower vitamin D and then the diseases themselves make them more susceptible to the infection. So these are always—these I’m just talking about like like confounding variables, things that could be affecting the situation that we’re not really factoring. So I’m just kinda spitballing, you know, off the cup with you guys. Majority of subjects classified as severe 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels were below 30, 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels were negatively related although clinically—clinical trials could provide more meaningful findings are the causation that 25-hydroxy D levels in COVID-19 severity. Basic healthy solutions such as vitamin D supplementation could be raised even in community levels and awareness of vitamin D benefits in fighting infections such as COVID-19 should be disseminated especially in the vulnerable elderly population. So they found it important enough that we should be raising the awareness of vitamin D in our elderly population. I think that was very, very important and powerful. You wanna comment there?
Evan Brand: Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, I just sent you a link in the chat from this New York Post story. So let’s move on from vitamin D and if you need a good vitamin D source, we do have professional-grade formulas. So you can—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Evan Brand: Get a hold of us, justinhealth.com or my website evanbrand.com. What we like to use is vitamin D usually around 5,000 units depending on the case and then we have professional versions that are also gonna have vitamin K1 and K2, which are very beneficial and those can help with reducing any potential blood clotting issues because there have been a couple of papers, a couple of articles coming out on people having blood coagulation problems—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Evan Brand: And having more severity so the K1 and K2 would help in theory thin the blood a little and reduce risk. But check out this New York Post one that—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Actually with Vitamin K though, vitamin K may actually increase the clotting. So you may want to be a little bit careful on the vitamin K. Some of the over-the-counter Naproxen is showing to be a little bit beneficial, maybe a little bit of white willow bark aspirin, baby aspirin, or maybe some natural white willow bark could be helpful or some higher dose like nattokinase enzymes. So maybe the systemic enzymes could also be very, very helpful in kinda thinning things out. So be careful with the vitamin K. Now, if you’re getting it from food, from green vegetables or ghee or butter, you’re probably okay. So I wanted to highlight that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I must have said it wrong.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anything else you want to say?
Evan Brand: I must have said it wrong. Yeah, no you did good. For some reason I was thinking that there was some issue with like the Coumadin and the vitamin K combo. I guess we’re thinking that the blood—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It inhibits the vitamin K.
Evan Brand: It’s gonna mess it up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s gonna mess it up. Now again, like I would never say don’t eat your green vegetables or don’t eat your ghee because I think that there’s enough nutrition and antioxidants in those compounds. Like in this study, we’ll talk about it. They talk about sulforaphane actually helping with a lot of the cytokines and that inflammation. Well, guess what? That’s what the infection is causing. So we wouldn’t ever wanna decrease the nutrients. I just think you wanna hold those nutrients stable and let your doctor, you know, know about that if they’re gonna be adding a blood thinner in there. It’s really only gonna matter if you’re doing something on the more like vitamin K inhibition side, right?
Evan Brand: Okay, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There are other ways to thin out bloods besides that.
Evan Brand: Alright, makes sense. Alright, so check out that New York Post I sent you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, let’s take a look at that.
Evan Brand: That was the Vitamin C one where basically this guy in the US, Dr. Weber, had basically looked at what was coming out of China and so he started implementing it in the US and you know, they’re talking about 23 different hospitals throughout New York.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me get it on screen. Let me get it on screen here for everyone to see.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this is it here, New York Post treating with Vitamin C.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and towards the bottom, he was talking about vitamin C levels in coronavirus patients dropped dramatically when they suffer sepsis and inflammatory response, so it makes all the sense in the world to try to maintain this level of it and there’s something else—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Vitamin C is administered in addition to such as the anti-malaria drug, that’s hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin, versus—and various biologics and blood thinners. Yeah, it makes.
Evan Brand: And then towards the top where his headshot is, go up where his headshot is, scroll up a little bit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so right there. The patients who received vitamin C did significantly better than those who did not get vitamin C.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really interesting. Let me kind of dovetail on that. So this is a study, actually out of China. Medical Drug and Discovery, this is early March. Can early and high intravenous vitamin D—vitamin C prevent and treat coronavirus? So this is interesting. So they’re talking about the acute respiratory distress syndrome and they’re talking about early uses of large dose of antioxidants and they abbreviated it as VC, vitamin C, may be an effective treatment for these patients. Clinical studies also show that high doses of oral vitamin C provide certain protection against viral infection, which is great. Neither of these things have side effects, which is awesome. I mean, if you go too high on the vitamin C, you could get loose stool. You may bypass that if you’re doing intravenous. They talk about coronavirus and influenza are among the pandemic viruses that can cause lethal lung injuries, right? The acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Viral infections could evoke cytokine storm that leads to lung capithelial and endothelial activation, neutrophil infiltration—that’s the white blood cells getting in there and lots of oxidative stress, right? Which create reactive oxygen and nitrogen species. What’s oxidation, everyone? That’s a loss of electron, like when you’re in doctorate school, right? You remember the saying OIL RIG, okay? Oxidation is a loss of an electron and reduction is a gain of electron. So when someone talks about oxidation, they’re talking about losing electrons and guess what? We have antioxidants. What’s an antioxidant? Anti—it’s an anti-loss of electron compound. So basically, they are donating electrons—they’re donating electrons when electrons are lost. That’s what vitamin D—that’s what vitamin C is doing. And so—so talks about it is usually accompanied by uncontrolled inflammation, oxidative injury and damage to the alveolar capillary barrier. So what happens is with the capillaries, there’s the what’s called Boyle's law where there’s gases exchanged, right? Deoxygenated gases or deoxygenated blood is being exchanged with oxygenated blood and then it goes back up to the left atrium, back to the left ventricle and then that oxygenated blood goes, but if there’s inflammation and damage to the capillaries and the alveoli in the lungs, you’re not gonna be able to exchange oxygen. That’s why you’re seeing this oxygen drop. So increased oxidative stress is a major insult in pulmonary injury and it manifests with substantially high mortality and morbidity. Now this is interesting, they talked about in the case report 29 patients with COVID-19 pneumonia showed an increase in C-reactive protein. That’s a marker of inflammation. It’s a marker of oxidative stress and they talked about that activation of the Nrf2 signaling plays an essential role in preventing cell injury from oxidative stress. So Nrf is like this anti-aging path that people try to increase with magnesium. They increase this with curcumin. They increase it with bioflavonoids like resveratrol. They increase it with compounds like milk thistle which help actually decrease a lot of this oxidation. Alright, I’ll pause right there, Evan, so you can comment. Go ahead.
Evan Brand: No, I think you’ve hit it all but the best part of this paper is right there at the bottom of your screen there, which is showing that they’re doing—they’ve had 50 and I mean, I’m sure the numbers are much higher than now because more time has passed but that in the treatment of 50 moderate to severe cases, high-dose vitamin C was successfully used. Doses vary between 10 and 20 grams a day and there was another part of this. It may have been another paper I have but basically, it was showing that even 6 grams a day oral was enough to reduce the infection risk and/or to improve symptoms so it’s amazing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s right there. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Yup, 100%. I think what you said—and I’m putting all the studies up on screen because I know what we’re saying may be a little bit controversial in case people are watching a lot of mainstream news that may be like, “Well, why the heck haven’t we been—have heard about this stuff?” Well, frankly it’s because certain governmental agencies they’re gonna, you know, tell the partyline in food and supplements and natural compounds really isn’t part of that which is kinda sad as this study over here showed, you know, they mentioned that vitamin D should be disseminated especially to the vulnerable population. Meaning that information should be disseminated. Research is saying it, so it’s not me saying it. Of course, that’s kinda where my bias lies because I think vitamins, especially essential nutrients your body can’t make of course should be at adequate levels. Let me go back to this study here. So the oxygenation index improved in real-time so people were actually getting better oxygen exchange. They were cured and were discharged. In fact, high-dose vitamin C has been clinically used for several decades in recent NIH expert panel, and again I’m not saying by the way, right? I’m not saying people were cured. I’m saying the study said that. So that’s not me speaking that, right? We don’t ever cure disease, right? Of course, only a drug can cure disease, right? That’s my legal disclaimer there. Alright, because of the development of the efficacious vaccines, antiviral drugs, because of the developments in these drugs, how they take more time to occur, right? 18 months for a vaccine. Vitamin C and other antioxidants are among currently available agents to mitigate COVID-19 and then the acute respiratory disease syndrome. Given the facts of the high-dose vitamin C is safe, healthcare professionals should take a close look at these opportunity. Obviously, well-designed clinical studies need to be developed so you can create the right protocols. But in general, there’s good data for this and I think this is a first-line thing that I have been saying from day 1. We look at the nutrients we need to support our immune system. What are the foundational ones? Vitamin A, cod liver oil, vitamin C, you know, your leafy green vegetables and some of your low-sugar fruit but also get it supplementally so it’s more therapeutic. Vitamin D, sunlight, some places mostly supplementation to get at that higher level, right? My goal was about 50 ng/mL on the vitamin D. So I think a good standard recommendation is 5,000 IU for every person. It gets pretty decently standard. You could go 10,000 if you’re lower and you need more of a bump and if you’re uncertain, get tested if you can. But if you don’t wanna leave the home, at least 5,000 is a good starting point as well. And then so vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D and then we could use something like glutathione or an N-acetylcysteine precursor which have been shown to help with the oxidative stress and they also help decrease viral replication. Not necessarily shown with COVID but it is showing with other viruses to decrease replication. So that’s kinda like my foundational nutrient stack for anyone listening and then obviously, we can throw some zinc in there as well, 30 to 50 mg of elemental zinc per day.
Evan Brand: That’s awesome. Well, let’s wrap it up. We talked longer than I thought we would on this thing but I am glad we kinda broke down some of these papers because people need to see this stuff and once again, this is not gonna be seen in headline, you know, 6 grams of vitamin D can reduce your risk X amount of percent. That just won’t be there. It’s gonna be death toll rises. I saw one headline over the weekend, life changes as we wait for a vaccine, you know, it’s all this cure me, cure me stuff, but I'm not personally waiting for a magic cure to come. I’m implementing all these strategies we’re discussing now to reduce my risk as much as possible. So if I were to get it, you know, hopefully I’d be in that mild to possibly asymptomatic case period.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You know, people talk about a vaccine coming, I mean, we’ve had 2 other coronaviruses in 2002 and 2003. We have the SARS coronavirus and then 2015, we had the MERS. So there’s been a lot—there’s been a lot of time that’s passed and we still don’t have a vaccine. So people forget that. So the fact that we don’t have a vaccine for other coronaviruses, odds are there probably won’t be one for this and also, we don’t have even a vaccine for HIV. So, I’m not aware of any vaccine for an RNA-based virus. So people can correct me in the description. I’m not aware of any vaccine that is available for an RNA-based virus so the odds are looking at past history there probably won’t be one this time around but I could be wrong, right? I know they’re doing different types of vaccines that are more like protein. They are like taking a specific protein in the virus and they’re trying to make a vaccine that targets that protein but not necessarily attack the virus so they’re doing different things. I think what’s really interesting is the—is if you have a lot of people that have antibodies, let’s go do platelet therapy. Let’s go spin out the platelet. Let’s do a blood transfusion, take the antibodies out of the platelets and then give them the antibodies in an IV. I mean, I think that’s just a common sense first-line therapy along with all of the nutrients, right? That we talked about and then maybe we play around with the hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc protocol as well if we need. So I think we have some really good treatments, palliative acute treatments now where maybe a vaccine isn’t even necessary if we can get things under control and get an adequate amount of herd immunity. It may be totally moot at that point once herd immunity is in place.
Evan Brand: I saw the president talking over the weekend, people were asking like, “How can life go back to normal without a vaccine?” And he just was like, “I think is gonna go away on its own without it, so maybe we don’t need it after all.” But when you see headlines about, you know, X amount of states or X governor says that people must wear masks until a vaccine is created. What if a vaccine does never come? That means you’re gonna wear a mask for the next 5 years and what if those people choose not to get it? Do the people who choose not to get it can’t go back to the grocery store? Like what, I mean, it’s just, it’s weird. They’re not really talking about that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, how did life go back to normal after the 1918 flu? I mean, like 3 million died. Do you know in 1918, Woodrow Wilson didn’t even shut down the economy? They just kept rolling. 3 million people died. How do we go back after that? We did it. How do we go back after a million people died in the Civil War? We did it. How do we go back to life after World World 1 and World War 2 in Vietnam? We did it, you know. I mean, our country, United States is a very resilient, very resilient country. So I’m confident we can do it and I think there’ll be herd immunity in the background that will provide this extra buffer of support. We didn’t even know about antibodies. I mean, they actually were doing some antibody, you know, infusion back then in the 1918. They really didn’t know what was going on. They didn’t have the testing that we have now. So we are lightyears above and beyond a lot of this stuff and I think we even—I don’t even think we had vitamin D supplementation back then. So we are so ahead of the game. I’m feeling really confident and I’m ready for people to get back to work.
Evan Brand: Yup, I hear you. Well, let’s wrap this thing up. We are available around the world with people. So we work by sending lab tests, unless it’s blood we send you out to a lab, but for the other labs we do, you do it at your home. And so if you wanna reach out clinically, get help, boost your immune system up, if you just need to simply run some blood panels or we can look at CRP levels, and vitamin D and things like that, we are available to help facilitate that if need be. So you could reach out to Dr. J at his website, justinhealth.com. My website, evanbrand.com and we’re glad to be here for you. So take good care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent, everyone. Great chatting with y’all. If you enjoy the podcast, put your comments down below. Really excited to know what you guys think, what you guys are doing, what’s working for you clinically. We appreciate you spreading the word to family and friends. Sharing is caring and if you wanna write a review as well, evanbrand.com/itunes, justinhealth.com/itunes for a review. We really appreciate it, guys. You take care. Have a good one.
Evan Brand: See you later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye. Buh-bye.
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