(1) John Campbell and Roger Seheult both again have videos on vitamin D
Apparently, the French medical academy now also got in on the act. Adapted from his notes: There is a significant correlation (95.4% confidence) between vitamin D deficiency and mortality from COVID-19. This phenomenon follows a North-South gradient, but Nordic countries are the exception, as foods there are routinely fortified with vitamin D (since the long subarctic winter otherwise causes major problems). Spain and Northern Italy have counterintuitively high rates with vitamin D deficiency, as they do not normally fortify foods nor take supplements.
Now I got curious about Israel with its sunny climate, and found this in the IMAJ (Israel Medical Association Journal)
(journal issue from the publisher) (ResearchGate entry for paper)
As you can see in Table 3 (screenshotted below), there is a difference between Ashkenazi Jews (i.e., those whose ancestors came from Central and Eastern Europe), non-Ashkenazi Jews (in Israeli public discourse, actual Sephardim — descendants of the Spanish Expulsion — are commonly lumped in with Yemenite, Iraqi, Iranian,… Jews who descend from their own Diaspora branches), and Israeli Arabs. While there are some quite swarthy Ashkenazi Jews (as in: swarthy enough to pass for Arab), and conversely there are non-Ashkenazi Jews and Arabs who are quite light-skinned, the difference between the population averages is quite obvious. And indeed, this is reflected the vitamin D deficiency statistics below. Even with the small sample, statistics are significant at the 95% or more level.
Now elderly people of any ethnicity have more vitamin D deficiencies to begin with. So what is the sample is narrowed down to people aged between 20 and 50? That’s the lower pane of that table:
Look, it’s a trade-off. Darker skin means you can spend more time outdoors in sunny climates without getting sunburned (the origin of the term “redneck”) or (G-d forbid) developing skin cancer. But it does make you more at risk for vitamin D deficiency — and all that entails for the immune system — if you live at northern(-ish) latitudes and/or spend most of your time indoors.
And you just have to stick the title of this paper in Google Scholar and look at the papers citing it to see a pile of studies linking vitamin D deficiencies with adverse outcomes for all sorts of illnesses.
Medscape referred to vitamin D as “the low-hanging fruit of the epidemic”. It sure is.
(2) Chemical and Engineering News reports that Eli Lilly has started phase 1 clinical trials with a monoclonal antibody.
The discovery effort began at the end of February. Now, just 3 months later, Lilly says it has given the experimental antibody, called LY-CoV555, to the first participants in a Phase I clinical study of people hospitalized with COVID-19. The trial began more than a month ahead of the companies’ earlier goal of late July.
The 90-day turnaround from discovery to injection is likely a record for monoclonal antibody drug development. LY-CoV555 may also be the first experimental drug designed after the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 to be tested as a treatment for COVID-19. The dozens of therapies already tested in COVID-19 patients—including remdesivir, an antiviral made by Gilead Sciences—were discovered before the pandemic and are now being repurposed to fight the coronavirus.
LY-CoV555 targets the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and in preclinical studies prevented the virus from infecting human cells. Scientists hope that mass-producing these antibodies will help clear the virus from people who are already infected and struggling to recover. Antibodies could also be given to healthy people to help prevent an infection for a few weeks or months. That prophylactic approach could prove useful for high-risk people, including those with compromised immune systems and medical workers who face frequent exposure to the virus. […]
LY-CoV555 targets the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and in preclinical studies prevented the virus from infecting human cells. Scientists hope that mass-producing these antibodies will help clear the virus from people who are already infected and struggling to recover. Antibodies could also be given to healthy people to help prevent an infection for a few weeks or months. That prophylactic approach could prove useful for high-risk people, including those with compromised immune systems and medical workers who face frequent exposure to the virus.
Lilly’s program is one of about two dozen underway to develop monoclonal antibodies that target SARS-CoV-2. Several other firms, including Regeneron and Vir Biotechnology, expect to begin clinical trials of their antibodies in June or July.
The main goal of Lilly’s Phase I clinical trial is to see if LY-CoV555 is safe, but the company is taking the unusual step of including a placebo group in the study. That could provide early signs of whether the drug is working. Lilly says that it expects results by the end of June and that it will begin a larger, Phase II trial soon after if the drug appears safe.
Lilly has already begun large-scale manufacturing and is working on having several hundred thousand doses ready by the end of the year.
The discovery effort began Feb. 25, when AbCellera received a plasma sample obtained from a person who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and had recovered. That plasma contained precious B cells—the antibody factories of our immune systems. AbCellera scanned through more than 5 million B cells to find ones that made antibodies targeting the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
(3) Both masgramondou and a friendly writer sent me links to this article in al-Grauniad (https://archive.is/lkKN0) I am glad to see that exasperation at repeated “coat-turning” on lockdown and social distancing measures is not just the province of political conservatives and libertarians.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 