A panel of medical reviewers from Public Health England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) has decided that health profession should not recommend vitamin D supplementation as a preventative against COVID-19.
Even though they acknowledged that vitamin D status is indeed associated with more severe outcomes from COVID-19, it’s not possible to “confirm causality” that vitamin D plays a role in COVID-19 infection, the reviewers determined. According to Medscape, the reviewers said “inconsistences between studies and differences between supplementation doses, settings, populations, durations of trials and definition of outcomes skewed their ability to judge the value of vitamin D in COVID-19 prevention.
Recently, the United Kingdom advised that everyone take 400 IUs of vitamin D a day from October through March. Medscape also mentioned that vitamin deficiency is so severe in the U.K. right now that some researchers are suggesting that vitamin D fortification be made mandatory in the U.K.
SOURCE: Medscape December 17, 2020