A full 35 pharmaceutical companies are now racing against the clock – and each other – to produce a vaccine against the coronavirus. Four companies have already commenced animal testings. Boston’s biotech firm Moderna is about to launch its first human trials.

The drug companies had a head start on this because they’d already begun work on several other coronaviruses, including SARS, but had to shelve them when the earlier viruses were contained.
When the current pandemic hit, they pulled them off the top shelf, dusted them off, and with a few tweaks here and there will soon be ready to go.
Countries like America and Britain believe that this is the only ultimate life-saver for this puzzling virus. As the British paper the Guardian put it, “With the World Health Organization finally declaring a pandemic, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick.”
Except that’s not quite true. New evidence from China shows that vitamin C saved the lives of a number of patients who were critical with COVID-19 respiratory infection.
The doctor trialing vitamin C in very ill patients was none other than the Dr. Enqian Mao, chief of emergency medicine department at Ruijin Hospital, a major hospital in Shanghai, affiliated with the Joatong University College of Medicine.
Dr Mao is also a member of the Senior Expert Team at the Shanghai Public Health Center, where all Chinese Covid-19 patients have been treated. Dr. Mao also co-authored the Shanghhai Guidelines for the Treatment of Covid-19 Infection, an official document endorsed by the Shanghai Medical Association and the Shanghai city government.
Mao was no stranger to vitamin C. He’d used it to successfully treat serious infections, such as pancreatitis and sepsis (life-threatening blood infections), for a decade. When Covid-19 first emerged, Dr Mao immediately recommended intravenous vitamin C for the patients being treated at his facility.
In the event, Dr. Mao eventually treated about 50 patients with moderate to severe illness with intravenous vitamin C, using doses of 10-20 g a day for 7-10 days.
As he reported last week in an online meeting to an international group of prominent doctors, scientists and health-care workers, all patients who received intravenous vitamin C improved, and there was no mortality. Zero.
The patients receiving vitamin C also had shorter hospital stays (by 3-5 days) than patients receiving standard medical treatment, who stayed in the hospital an average of 30 days.
This information hardly a revelation. Medicine has known about it for 80 years. In the 1940s, Dr Frederick Klenner, a respiratory specialist from Duke University, published some 28 scientific papers of multiple studies demonstrating that mixed administration of oral and intravenous vitamin C could successfully treat serious cases of viruses like flu and pneumonia.
Thirty years later, Dr Robert Cathcart, a protégé of Linus Pauling, replicated and built on Klenner’s results.
Why does vitamin C do what an arsenal of high-tech medicine can’t do?
For one thing, coronavirus patients mostly die from pneumonia. And vitamin C has a long history of being able to fight pneumonia. Doctors like Klenner showed that even relatively modest doses (like 1000mg intravenously followed by 500 mg every hour) were helpful.
Surgeons at a hospital in Buffalo, New York, even used vitamin C as a preventative against pneumonia, and found a ‘complete disappearance of this complication.’ Even relatively tiny (200 mg/day) of vitamin C resulted in an 80 percent decrease in deaths among the respiratory patients who were severely ill.
The great news is that it doesn’t have to be the exotic kind, such as liposomal vitamin C, or the buffered variety with magnesium. Just the cheap ascorbate works just as well.
We don’t need an expensive and no doubt rushed vaccine right now. As Andrew Saul, editor of Orthomolecular Medicine News Service wrote in February: “We're talking about twenty cents' worth of vitamin C a day to save lives now.”
There’s no doubt that low levels of vitamin C increase susceptibility to viruses like corona. To stay well, make sure to get your 20 cents today – and every day.