In 1948, just three years after the end of the Second World War, an earlier pandemic than Covid gripped America. Tens of thousands of people were struck down by the polio virus, and with no cure in sight and a vaccine still to be developed, thousands died. Those who survived were often left crippled—just as America’s then president Franklin D. Roosevelt had been.

Seven years earlier, a young doctor named Frederick Klenner, a general practitioner in Reidsville, North Carolina, had begun experimenting with a cure for polio. Inspired by the work of American bacteriologist Claus Jungeblut, Klenner began experimenting with giving patients heroic doses of intravenous vitamin C.

On June 10, 1949, a year after the polio epidemic was at its height, Klenner presented a summary of his work to the annual conference of the American Medical Association (AMA), held that year in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He claimed to have treated 60 infants and children with his protocol and cured every last one.

As he announced to the incredulous audience of doctors: “In the past seven years, virus infections have been treated and cured in a period of 72 hours by the employment of massive frequent injections of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C. I believe that if vitamin C in these massive doses—6,000 to 20,000 mg in a twenty-four hour period—is given to these patients with poliomyelitis, none will be paralyzed and there will be no further maiming or epidemics of poliomyelitis.”

Klenner’s talk was greeted by a polite silence. Here was the claim by a respected practitioner that he’d found a simple cure for the greatest scourge of the time, and not one doctor raised a hand to ask a question. One possible reason is that two virologists, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, were both in the audience and both were in the midst of work on a polio vaccine.

Eight years later, in 1957, when the polio epidemic was already largely over, Salk released his injectable vaccine. Five years after that, Sabin licensed his oral vaccine. Both took the credit for ending an epidemic that had largely run its course, eight and 13 years after Klenner had found and successfully tested a simple, effective and inexpensive solution.

The problem was simply that it was not a drug. Vitamin C works by activating a particular enzyme called myeloperoxidase in white blood cells, which produce hydrogen peroxide. This in turn helps to create hydroxy, a powerful free radical that kills viruses and bacteria.

Undaunted by the medical community’s indifference, Klenner went on to experiment with using giant intravenous doses of vitamin C to treat a host of bacterial and viral diseases. He published his successes with a range of diseases, both viral and nonviral, including diphtheria, malaria, tetanus, tuberculosis and typhoid fever. Other doctors showed that vitamin C could even cure shingles by eradicating its cause, the herpes virus.

But vitamin C is not simply effective on bugs, as cardiologist Dr Thomas Levy discovered to his amazement. “I was awestruck as I witnessed an event that forever changed the direction of my life and the way in which I would practice medicine,” writes Levy in his book Primal Panacea (MedFox Publishing).

“That day I watched a very ill patient with multiple sclerosis rapidly display a striking clinical improvement that just was not supposed to happen. . . . The patient’s change was so striking and occurred so rapidly that it radically altered my understanding of physiology, disease, and medicine.”

In 1993, Levy had been visiting the offices of noted dentist Dr Hal Huggins, a noted dentist who believed that many illnesses started with the state of a patient’s teeth. Huggins challenged many standard dentistry practices by treating the entire patient with diet, nutrition, supplements and general lifestyle recommendations. He was especially expert in removing traditional dental toxins, such as mercury fillings and infected teeth.

On that day a woman arrived, very ill and listless, in a wheelchair, a victim of an advanced case of MS. Levy soon learned that she had numerous teeth missing, some dental implants and root canal–treated teeth. That day she underwent several hours of dental surgery to pull certain teeth and clean infected holes in the jaw, followed by intravenous vitamin C.

“Almost immediately after the end of her dental surgery, she began smiling, joking a bit, proclaiming her energy was greatly improved, and even declaring she wanted to go ‘out on the town’ that night with her caregiver and try to eat a steak with the few remaining good teeth she had on the left side of her mouth,” writes Levy.

Dr Levy expressed his amazement at her extraordinary turnaround to Dr Huggins, who simply pointed to the empty vitamin C IV bag.

After witnessing the woman’s rapid progress, Levy resolved to study this miracle vitamin further. Since that time he has made it his life’s work to research the ability of large doses of vitamin C to cure all manner of illnesses, from viruses to cancer and even his own specialty, heart disease.

In our forthcoming issue of WDDTY in October we offer a roundup of Dr Levy’s findings and personal clinical experience showing that clogged arteries, high blood pressure and other heart conditions don’t, in many cases, require drugs or surgery, but just the simplest of solutions: a vitamin pill.