STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Dr. Andrew Saul, editor-in-chief of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, presents valuable information on the importance of vitamin C for disease treatment, including COVID-19
- Vitamin C at extremely high doses acts as an antiviral drug, actually killing viruses
- Saul states that, based on decades of expert research and clinical usage, the coronavirus pandemic can be dramatically slowed, or stopped, with the immediate widespread use of high doses of vitamin C
- Facebook has blocked much of Saul’s information relating to vitamin C and COVID-19, claiming it’s false, based on the opinion of anonymous fact-checkers, most of whom have no formal medical training
- The government of Shanghai, China, officially recommends treating COVID-19 with intravenous vitamin C at a dose of 200 mg per kg of body weight per day; the protocol was published by the Chinese Medical Association
- Saul believes vitamin C is the most important “crisis therapy” for those who find themselves in the intensive care unit, extremely ill and at risk of dying from COVID-19, as well as the least expensive preventive for the general public
In the video above, Dr. Andrew Saul, editor-in-chief of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, presents valuable information on the importance of vitamin C for disease treatment, including COVID-19 — information that’s being widely silenced via organized censorship.1
His Tokyo presentation, “Orthomolecular Medicine and Coronavirus Disease: Historical Basis for Nutritional Treatment,” highlights the fact that when used as a treatment, high doses of vitamin C — often 1,000 times more than the U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) — are needed.
It’s a cornerstone of medical science that dose affects treatment outcome, but this premise isn’t accepted when it comes to vitamin therapy the way it is with drug therapy. Most vitamin C research has used inadequate, low doses, which don’t lead to clinical results.
“The medical literature has ignored over 80 years of laboratory and clinical studies on high-dose ascorbate (vitamin C) therapy,” Saul notes, adding that while it’s widely accepted that vitamin C is beneficial in fighting illness, controversy exists over to what extent. “Moderate quantities provide effective prevention,” he says, while “large quantities are therapeutic.”
Three Pioneers of High-Dose Vitamin C Therapy
Vitamin C is perhaps most well-known for its antioxidant properties — properties it maintains because of an ability to donate electrons to oxidized molecules. Even in small quantities, vitamin C helps protect proteins, lipids, and DNA and RNA in your body from reactive oxygen species that are generated during normal metabolism as well as due to toxin exposure (such as to cigarette smoke and air pollution).
Vitamin C is also involved in the biosynthesis of collagen, carnitine, and catecholamines, according to Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D., and as such, “vitamin C participates in immune function, wound healing, fatty acid metabolism, neurotransmitter production, and blood vessel formation, as well as other key processes and pathways.”2
Vitamin C at extremely high doses, however, acts as an antiviral drug, actually killing viruses. While it does have anti-inflammatory activity, which helps prevent the massive cytokine cascade associated with severe SARS-CoV-2 infection, its antiviral capacity likely has more to do with it being a non-rate-limited free radical scavenger. Three pioneers of high-dose vitamin C therapy include:
1.Dr. Claus Washington Jungeblut — A professor of bacteriology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Jungeblut was a pioneer polio researcher and the first to report that vitamin C is an antiviral antitoxin. Vitamin C was used as prevention and treatment for polio, an idea first published by Jungeblut in 1935.3
“It’s astonishing to many that if vitamin C were proven to be an antiviral, even in small doses, back in the 1930s, that interest would be there now, in the COVID pandemic, to use vitamin C as a preventive and, indeed, as a treatment for the viral disease at the present time,” Saul says.
2.Dr. Frederick Robert Klenner — For decades, Klenner, a North Carolina-based board-certified chest specialist, treated patients with injections of vitamin C ranging from 300 milligrams (mg) to 1,200 mg per kilogram (kg) of body weight per day, successfully treating polio, pneumonia, and other serious viral diseases.4
Klenner, the first physician to use vitamin C therapy with 40 years of medical practice, said, “When proper amounts are used, ascorbic acid will destroy all virus organisms.”
3.Dr. Robert F. Cathcart III — Cathcart was a California physician and orthopedic surgeon who developed the value of vitamin C as an antiviral and used oral and IV doses of up to 200,000 mg per day. Beginning in the late 1960s, Cathcart used large doses of vitamin C to successfully treat viral illnesses including influenza, pneumonia, hepatitis, and AIDS.
It’s often asked how you can determine if you’ve taken too much vitamin C, and Cathcart described this in great detail in a paper in 1981.5 With oral doses, when you’ve had all the vitamin C your body can handle, you’ll develop loose stools. With intravenous vitamin C, however, this doesn’t occur. Liposomal vitamin C will also allow you to take much higher dosages without getting loose stools.
You can take up to 100 grams (100,000 mg) of liposomal vitamin C without problems and get really high blood levels, equivalent to or higher than intravenous vitamin C. This should be viewed as an acute treatment, however.
Fact Checkers Flagged Expert Vitamin C Opinion as False
Cathcart, a physician with decades of experience using vitamin C to treat viral illness, said, “I have not seen any flu yet that was not cured or markedly ameliorated by massive doses of vitamin C.” Saul believes this would apply to any viral illness, including COVID-19. He posted the quote on Facebook, which quickly flagged it as “false information” according to its fact-checkers:
“Some so-called fact-checkers, employed by Facebook, decided that this statement is false. I do not understand how the opinion of a medical doctor can be considered false. You can disagree with it, but it’s not false. If this is what the doctor observed, if this is the doctor’s professional opinion, it is a valid point of view. But not on Facebook.”
February 12, 2020, Saul made the statement on Facebook that based on the research of Jungeblut, Klenner, and Cathcart, “The coronavirus pandemic can be dramatically slowed, or stopped, with the immediate widespread use of high doses of vitamin C.” Facebook immediately blocked his post claiming it was false, based on the opinion — again — of anonymous fact-checkers, most of whom have no formal medical training.
He responded, “Preventing and treating respiratory infections with large amounts of vitamin C is well established. Those who believe that vitamin C generally has merit but massive doses are ineffective or somehow harmful would do well to read the original papers for themselves.”
Saul adds that while other nutrients are also important, he believes vitamin C is the most important “crisis therapy” for those who find themselves in the intensive care unit, extremely ill and at risk of dying from COVID-19. It’s also the least expensive preventive for the general public.
“After I posted that one mention about vitamin C and COVID,” Saul said, “vitamin C started selling out and disappearing from shelves in stores around the world. So I guess the fact-checkers were a little bit late. But ultimately, they did shut down the spread of this information — information about viruses being treated with vitamin C.”6
Chinese Physicians Recommend Vitamin C Treatment for COVID
Saul also highlights a study, published in Chinese, that detailed the accounts of four patients admitted to Xi’an Jiaotong University Second Hospital with COVID-19, who recovered in February 2020.
“High-dose vitamin C achieved good results in clinical applications,” the researchers noted, adding, “Vitamin C treatment should be initiated as soon as possible after admission,” and, “High-dose vitamin C can not only improve antiviral levels but more importantly, can prevent and treat acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress.”
Although Saul shared this information, it was not picked up by the media. Another quote from Dr. ZhiYong Peng, chief of critical care at Zhongnan Hospital, Wuhan University, reads:
“In my department and other hospitals we highly recommend the patients use 12,000 milligrams to 24,000 mg a day of vitamin C. That works for significant reduction of COVID becoming a severe case. In my hospital, all the medical professionals are given vitamin C powder, to take 1,000 to 2,000 mg. I heard that the majority of the major hospitals in Wuhan are giving vitamin C powder to their medical professionals.”
Further, according to Saul, the government of Shanghai, China, officially recommends treating COVID-19 with intravenous vitamin C at a dose of 200 mg per kg of body weight per day, an adult intravenous dosage of approximately 16,000 mg/day. The protocol was published by the Chinese Medical Association.7 Facebook and its fact-checkers, again disagreed, flagging the information as “partly false.”
“They never contacted me to check my sources … They never contacted the hospitals … or anyone in China … They never contacted the experts that we quoted, and they never contacted the government of Shanghai,” Saul said. “They simply decided it was false news, and that was the end of it. I believe withholding vitamin C treatment information from the public withholds it from the patient. I accuse the media of negligence.”
Lancet Suggests High-Dose Vitamin C as ‘Rescue Therapy’
Even a commentary published in The Lancet: Respiratory Medicine in March 2020 states, “Rescue therapy with high-dose vitamin C can also be considered”8 in patients with respiratory failure from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) caused by COVID-19. “Very little has been done with this, unfortunately,” Saul states, despite it having been published in the earliest months of the pandemic.
Other articles and YouTube videos from physicians supporting the use of vitamin C for COVID-19 have also been censored or removed completely. One objection sometimes given is that high-dose vitamin C is dangerous, but as Saul notes, it’s one of the most studied therapies in history.
In 2007, a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine by Harri Hemila, considered to be an authority on vitamin C, called potential harms of large doses of vitamin C “unfounded,” and stated that patients with pneumonia can take up to 100 grams a day of vitamin C without developing diarrhea, “possibly because of the changes in vitamin C metabolism caused by the severe infection.”9
Past research by Hemila and colleagues found that 17,000 mg/day of intravenous vitamin C shortened intensive care unit stays by 44%.10 According to Saul, Dr. Richard Cheng, a Chinese American physician, further reported that about 50 moderate to severe cases of COVID-19 infection were treated with high-dose vitamin C, involving 10,000 mg for moderate cases and 20,000 mg for more severe cases, for seven to 10 days.
Not only did all of the patients improve, but there were no side effects reported from the vitamin C therapy. “You guessed it,” Saul said, “Fact-checkers said it’s false. Facebook said it’s false. The media said it’s false. And this report, by a physician direct from Shanghai, who personally worked with the chief of emergency medicine of a major hospital, right there, and had success … all of this was called false information and banned from Facebook.”
‘This Is Organized Censorship’
In February 2020, Saul reports, the World Health Organization met with about a dozen tech companies, including Google, Amazon, and YouTube, instructing them to stop the spread of coronavirus misinformation. The group, which planned to meet every few months, has been targeting information related to natural health treatments like vitamin C, calling them fake news and conspiracies.11
But in reality, Saul said, the labeling of vitamin C for COVID-19 as fake news is “organized censorship. This does fit the description of conspiracy. They are trying to stop the information on vitamin C from getting out. And, unfortunately, to a large extent, they have succeeded.”
Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, on the record in 2016, “Take vitamin C. It can enhance your body’s defense against microbes.”12
Then, during the pandemic, he mentioned it again, in an Instagram interview, where he said that vitamin D will help your body resist infection, and added, “The other vitamin that people take is vitamin C because it's a good antioxidant, so if people want to take a gram or so of vitamin C, that would be fine.”13,14
Cheng also interviewed a family in Wuhan, China, which took large doses of vitamin C and didn’t get COVID-19, despite close contact with a confirmed COVID-19 patient. The video was removed by YouTube. “I can’t believe this is happening,” Cheng said.
Dr. Paul Marik has also shown a protocol of intravenous vitamin C with hydrocortisone and thiamine (vitamin B1) dramatically improves survival rates in patients with sepsis. Since sepsis is one of the reasons people die from COVID-19 infection, Marik's vitamin C protocol may go a long way toward saving people's lives in this pandemic.
That protocol calls for 1,500 mg of ascorbic acid every six hours and appears radically effective. However, I would recommend taking even higher doses using liposomal vitamin C if you're taking it orally.
Personally, I discourage people from taking mega doses of vitamin C on a regular basis if they're not actually sick. I view high dose vitamin C as a very safe and effective intervention for acute upper respiratory infections largely because it converts to hydrogen peroxide, which your body uses to fight infections.
I don’t believe it is necessary to take high doses for long periods of time, however. Vitamin C’s potential for treating severe illness, and helping to prevent it, is something that should be widely shared, not silenced.
For more information and further reading, Saul’s Orthomolecular Medicine News Service has an archive of several dozen news releases on COVID-19 and nutrition that you probably have not seen in the media.15
