#272 How Effective Are Vaccines and Ways to Reduce Infection Rate - Chris Masterjohn Phd

Chris Masterjohn (0:00)

So a 9-month-old infection is like the same immunity as like a 2-month-old Pfizer vaccine. But if you get it at the same time, then the natural infection provides a much higher level of immunity.

Siim Land (0:13)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Chris Masterjohn. Chris has a Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences, and he's currently doing independent research. In this episode, Chris is going to bring the latest update to his Covid Nutrition Guide that he published last spring 2020 If you want to get the Covid Nutrition Guide, then head over to siimland.com forward slash two seven two. This episode is brought to you by SelfDecode. SelfDecode is a genetics decoding company. You can get personalized health recommendations based on your DNA and the latest scientific research. They have numerous different DNA reports for different areas of focus like weight loss, longevity, gastrointestinal health, cognition and even mood.

Recently SelfDecode came out with their 2 software that incorporates artificial intelligence in generating DNA reports. It is the most advanced and comprehensive consumer DNA service in the world.

You can get a 10% discount with the code SIIM at selfdecode.com. Head over to selfdecode.com and use the code SIIM for a 10% discount on your personalized DNA reports.

Chris, welcome back to the show.

Chris Masterjohn (1:12)

Siim, great to be here. Thank you so much for having me back on.

Siim Land (1:15)

Yeah, I'm really excited to talk with you because the last time we talked, it was a year and a half ago or something, during the actual first months of the pandemic. We talked about what it is and what's the biggest risk factor, etc. A lot of things have changed since that time.

What's maybe the biggest updates for you?

Chris Masterjohn (1:35)

At a very high level, the biggest difference between, say, March through August of 2020 versus now, is that in the first few months of the pandemic, we didn't really have any other tools at our disposal except mechanistic speculation and what did we know about other respiratory viruses. At that time, I was thinking of it from the perspective of, well, all these things work for cold and flu, but what do we know about how this virus is the same or different? Then brainstorm, what are the things that we can be most sure generalizes and what are the things that we should be more careful of? Now, well more than a year later, we now have over 40 randomized controlled trials of nutrients. Along that path, we had lots of cell studies, we had lots of newly discovered mechanisms, we learned a lot about how the virus worked, but it wasn't until towards not the very end, but towards late 2020, when we had the first randomized controlled trial done on vitamin D, and then ever since then, there were so many trials were registered and we just had to wait many months for them to come out and now we have over 40 that have actually been published. One thing that's been clear that is different now is, there were reasons to be cautious about fat soluble vitamins, especially vitamins A and D at the beginning. Part of that was we knew that they were helpful for cold and flu, but there were reasons to think that they might increase the ability of the virus to get into our cells. At the beginning of the pandemic, I took a very cautious point of view towards the fat soluble vitamins and I said, look, we don't want to be deficient in these, but it doesn't seem to make sense to mega dose them either until we learn more. One thing that's become very clear with vitamin D is that you want your 25-OHG, the main marker vitamin D nutritional status to be in the 50-60 nanogram per milliliter range to basically maximally suppress the risk of getting infected. Now, because vitamin D doesn't abolish the risk of getting infected, you never bring it to zero, but you bring it as low as you can, which is about cutting it in half.

Everyone in the United States who had gotten a PCR test with Quest Diagnostics and had gotten a vitamin D test leading up to that in the year before, across roughly 200,000 people, the infection rate went from about 13 percent to about 6 percent. So it was cut in half as you go up to 50 to 60 nanograms per milliliter. The other thing that my current interpretation of the six randomized controlled trials that have been published with vitamin D, and this could be subject to change when the other 20-something that are being done right now are published. But so far, it looks like if you go into the illness and you get sick and you have been keeping your vitamin D levels up, you could probably do, you might be able to skip a loading dose, but you could probably do like 100,000 IU for one or two days and then drop it to 10,000 IU would probably be the most logical thing to do. But if you went into that being very deficient and then you wind up in the hospital, it is way too late for vitamin D to do anything. And at that point, the doctors need to prescribe the more active form calcifidiol. And so when the other 20 trials, 20-something trials are published, we'll probably be able to add some nuances to that, but that's my current interpretation.