Lets spend $200m on an RSV vaccine for babies, but nothing on vitamin D which dramatically...
Imagine we were spending $200 million to inject pregnant women and vaccinate babies against RSV, and the real cause of many of the life threatening cases was just low vitamin D?
RSV (Respiratory syncytial virus) is something nearly everyone catches by the time they are two years old. It's like a bad cold. We'll go on to catch it every few years for the rest of our lives, and it's really only a problem for babies and the very old.
In the last week by some odd coincidence, the BBC, ABC and CBC all have stories promoting the idea of saving babies with RSV vaccines which often cost $300 dollars each (USD). The government rollouts are being promoted with free advertising on news programs that pretend to be journalists. But not a single journalist asked the obvious question -- if most babies recover just fine, what is different about the babies that struggle. Could it be that low vitamin D puts them at risk?
Two studies suggest that babies with low vitamin D are, by golly, 5 to 10 times more likely to need intensive care.
Back in 2011, Belderbos et al looked at 158 babies and measured the levels of vitamin D in their cord blood and found those with low levels went on to have six times the risk of a severe lung infection compared to babies with normal levels. (Low was <50 nmol/L (20 ng/ml) and normal was 75 nmol/L (30 ng/ml). It was a small study but other studies at the time already showed vitamin D played a major role in stopping the inflammatory responses getting out of control.
By 2022, another study on 125 babies showed that the amount of virus each child had didn't predict how severe their infection would be, but their vitamin D level when they arrived in hospital did. Those with the lowest vitamin D had a ghastly 11 fold increase in odds of suffering a life threatening illness. (Again low means <50nmol/L (20ng/ml)).
If 20% of babies are deficient in Vitamin D, and the 11 fold risk is not just an artefact, that means about half of the babies suffering a life threatening disease are struck down because of their deficiency. Maybe this is a gross overestimate, but where are the studies? Why aren't our Ministers for Health launching big programs to figure it out? Even if the risk is only 50% more, these are actual babies we're talking about.