A User’s Guide to Vitamin C in the Context of COVID-19

by Amory B. Lovins and Eric Rasmussen MD

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This document supplements the authors’ article Don’t Just Avoid the Virus — Defeat It by Strengthening Your Immunity, which should be read first.

Don’t Just Avoid the Virus — Defeat It by Strengthening Your Immunity

Lovins’s 16 March 2020 semitechnical talk “Slowing Contagion” documented the reported value of taking oral vitamin C to help prevent COVID-19 infection or a similar respiratory RNA viruses. If you do get such an infection, medical evidence shows that adequate oral l-ascorbate can make your illness shorter and milder, with less chance of progressing to severe or critical pneumonia. Intravenous vitamin C in doses typically of tens of grams or more has been found safe and effective in treating such pneumonias in US and Chinese Intensive Care Units, along with oral vitamin C in prevent­ing or moderating them (see references on slide 12 of the PDF). Two new papers there show ~2 grams per day (g/d) of vitamin C can shorten ICU stays 8.6%, and 1–6 g/d shortens average ventila­tor dura­tion, for patients needing over ten hours of it, by 25%. That’s a lot of cheap “virtual ventilators” to…