Blaming it on Vitamin D instead of socioeconomic policies of the ruling government is deflection and dismissal of more substantial class and race issues in responses to Covid, especially Sweden's which is broadly considered to be especially fucked up.
"Nope, Sweden didn't mess up, it's just that they have more brown people and uhhh vitamin D". The hell prior do you have that you think such a conjecture makes more sense than "Sweden's COVID response not only sucked, it sucked especially for poor and marginalized people"?
I don't want to jump in on the topic of whether Sweden's response was correct, but there is data to indicate that there is likely some other factor, possibly vitamin D deficiency, at play in addition to social factors. In the UK there's roughly a 4.2 times higher overall fatality rate for blacks than whites, and 1.9 after controls. That isn't enough to explain Sweden's rates, but it does look like it would plays a substantial role alongside socio-economic issues.
> Areas with large proportions of Black/African American residents are at markedly higher risk that is not fully explained by characteristics of the environment and pre-existing conditions in the population.
> There are now seven observational preprints (Abstracts and links below), based on COVID-19 positive patient data, indicating vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency, do indeed factor significantly in COVID-19 severity and mortality – for example, and thought provokingly, 10 to 20 times increases were seen in ICU and mortality in Asian studies.[5, 6] One further USA based study observes vitamin D may factor in COVID-19 infection.[7] Whilst differing in, size and exact approach, results of all preprints point clearly in the same direction.
> Concerningly, vitamin D is often low in high-risk COVID-19-groups, such as, BAME including African Americans, elderly in care-homes, and the obese. Low vitamin D is also increasingly common in young.[8] Studies suggest low ‘D’ factors in Kawasaki disease[9, 10, 11] ; occurrences are increasingly being linked with COVID-19.[12,13]
Yes there is a correlation between Vitamin D deficiency and COVID mortality. But you are not just saying that. You are saying that the effect size coming from Vitamin D explains a significant portion of the excess mortality in Sweden. That's just a guess and it's weird that you would make that conjecture when there's the wildly spectacular policy difference between Sweden and everyone else. Neither of the studies you linked support that.
I don't have time to read the studies you linked. If you did, what is the relative impact of socioeconomic status, the fact that the most polluted zip codes in NYC are predominantly black neighborhoods, and vitamin D deficiency?
