Rediscovered — Vitamin C Benefits Concealed for 70 Years

Vitamin C was first isolated in 1928 and the chemical structure was identified in 1933.¹ It wasn’t until the early 1970s that Dr. Linus Pauling recommended that the optimum daily intake of vitamin C was 2,000 milligrams (mg) and everyone should consume at least 200 mg to 250 mg per day.²

However, as “modern” medicine and the pharmaceutical industry ramped up the health care machine, vitamin C quickly fell out of favor as it is inexpensive, easy to administer and has very few side effects. In other words, as effective as vitamin C is in prevention and treatment, you can’t make money prescribing or manufacturing it.

It’s important to note that most mammals can make vitamin C in the body,³ but humans and guinea pigs must get it from their diet. Vitamin C is an essential factor in many enzyme reactions and several studies have shown that it’s associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular conditions such as stroke, high blood pressure and coronary heart disease.

Vitamin C has always been vital to immune function, but research data also show that it plays an important role in the treatment of several health conditions, including cancer. Research suggests that IV vitamin C could extend survival,⁴ even in people with pancreatic⁵ and ovarian cancers,⁶ which are among the deadliest types of tumor growth.

Throughout the early years of the COVID pandemic, researchers and doctors who used vitamin C to help treat the infection were ridiculed and “modern” medicine organizations tried to sideline them. In the following three years, information about vitamin C continued to be shared but many suffered at the hands of Big Pharma.

Vitamin C — A Historical Perspective

Since vitamin C cannot be patented, it’s a significant threat to the pharmaceutical industry and Western medicine’s disease model of care. An Australian independent journalist, Just Call Me Jack from Totality of Evidence, published a deep-dive history of vitamin C,⁷ how it’s been used and suppressed.

He intends to identify and capture significant data points throughout history that have led up to the COVID-19 pandemic and document what has happened since, including to “discover incremental changes through time, which on their own may seem laudable or benign, but watch them morph and put them together and the Totality of Evidence reveals a picture of ever-increasing centralized control and influence.”⁸

Vitamin C has played a role in this influence.⁹ In 2002, Dr. Thomas E. Levy published the book “Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins: Curing the Incurable.” By 2011, research and publications identifying ways in which vitamin C might be used were reaching the media. Dr. Suzanne Humphries published a special report on the treatment of whooping cough and Orthomolecular Medical News proposed intravenous vitamin C as a cancer therapy.

Vitamin C and Sepsis

In November 2013, “Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C” was revised and republished. The book recorded the clinical experiences of Dr. Frederick R. Klenner, who used vitamin C in the treatment of polio, which I discuss below. In 2014, Alpha Fowler from Virginia Commonwealth University and his team published Phase 1 safety trials for the IV administration of vitamin C in patients with sepsis.

The goal was to move to Phase 2 trials and when Dr. Paul Marik, former chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in East Virginia, was asked if he wanted to participate, he declined since vitamin C had already become his standard of care after the Phase 1 trial was published.¹⁰ Marik further developed the treatment protocol, adding thiamine and steroids, which was published in the journal Chest in 2017.¹¹

Some physicians joined Marik in using the early sepsis protocol while others dragged their heels, waiting for larger clinical trials despite knowing the treatment doesn’t have significant side effects or make patients sicker.

In a 2018 review¹² of the protocol, the writers noted the reception for the treatment was mixed, which means your ability to receive this potentially life-saving treatment depends on the hospital where you end up. One of the anticipated larger studies was the Vitamin C, Thiamine and Steroids in Sepsis (VICTUS) study sponsored by Emory University and published in JAMA.¹³

Initially, the researchers, including Fowler, hoped for 2,000 participants but finalized the study with 501. In a presentation at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, Fowler describes the positive effects of vitamin C on sepsis.¹⁴

However, the VICTUS paper came to a negative conclusion — that the treatment “did not significantly increase ventilator- and vasopressor-free days within 30 days”¹⁵ — because he was told he to make it negative. In this video¹⁶ of the presentation, you can see Fowler’s reaction to the negative conclusion he and the team were asked to make.

He notes that $1 billion spent on clinical trials had not produced anything that enhanced survival, but in the VICTUS trial they “have shown an outcome difference.” Fowler goes on to say:¹⁷

“I got an email from them [JAMA] yesterday and I shared this with Leslie today. They have asked us to state that this trial is negative and that we do not recommend it as a therapy. I am going to put a caveat into that ‘until a large phase 3 trial is done.'”

In 2022, Marik’s paper in the journal Chest came under attack in a series of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud from Australian doctor Kyle Sheldrick.¹⁸ The journal then launched a thorough review of the study and in April 2023, stated there were no methodological errors. Marik and the FLCCC followed up with a defamation suit against Sheldrick and, as a result, Sheldrick had to publicly acknowledge regret for questioning Marik’s integrity.