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 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