Zinc tablets associated with 40% less death, half the ICU admission, and a quicker release from hospital

By Jo Nova

Two weeks treatment costs $3.75*

In Tunisia from February to May last year 470 people with Covid were randomly either given 50mg of zinc each day for two weeks or given a placebo. In the zinc group, after 30 days, 6% had died, and 5% had been admitted to intensive care. Meanwhile in the placebo group 9% had died and 11% had gone to the ICU. People taking zinc got out of hospital a few days before the people who didn’t.

Since there were no serious adverse effects in anyone from taking zinc, it’s obvious that good governments were handing out zinc tablets in carparks, schools and shopping malls, thus saving lives, millions of dollars, and keeping hospitals half empty. The rich world looks to healthcare systems like El Salvador. Shame about the other sclerotic swamps and backwaters of crony medicine. Sometimes countries have too much money to get good treatment.

In Australia, the government spent billions on experimental barely-tested vaccines with hidden results and secret contracts. Our TGA told everyone the vaccines were safe and useful but fined someone $8,000 for advertising on their website that ivermectin and zinc lozenges were effective against Covid. But who fines the TGA?

The error bars are large in the little Tunisian study (below), and we could debate the meaning of it except that there are 40 other studies on 45,000 patients in 16 countries which largely say that same thing. Early treatment with zinc reduces deaths by 40%, or even more.

 

With viruses every day counts

In larger study (Mayberry) 940 patients start zinc a week before or within 48 hours of getting hospitalized, and those people were 50% less likely to die.

In the Tunisian study people who got treatment in three days were vastly better off than those who didn’t start til 4 to 7 days. This also makes it fairly easy to design other studies to fail simply by starting treatment too late.

For any virus, ideally, we’d have figured out a plan with our legally approved doctor and have it in the cupboard ready to use.

Nationally, those delays waiting for an appointment, a chemist, or a test result mean we need bigger hospitals. But then, hospitals probably don’t mind that. With the whole system profiting from treating sick people, not stopping them getting sick, it’s “probably” not an accident that cheap solutions get forgotten on the side of the stockholder’s super-highway. Billions of dollars depends upon it.

Zinc is useful in so many ways

Zinc is used in about 100 different enzymes. Without enough zinc, immune cells don’t work properly. Zinc prevents the virus getting into cells preserving the tissue barriers. It slows the viral factory assembly line that is trying to churn out baby viruses. Zinc is needed to stop our immune cells from dumping too many of the reactive oxygen and nitrogen species that do so much damage to our tissues. So zinc reduces inflammation storm — mostly just by helping our immune system do what it is supposed to do.

 

Wessels even suggests that quite a few Covid symptoms might be related to zinc deficiencies.

The most common symptoms of COVID-19 are impaired smell and taste, fever, cough, sore throat, general weakness, pain as aching limbs, runny nose, and in some cases diarrhea (10). In the subsequent chapters, we will associate most of those symptoms with altered zinc homeostasis and explain how zinc might prevent or attenuate those symptoms, as summarized in Figure 1

Indeed, most of the highest risk patients for Covid are also conditions where zinc deficiencies are common:

…the intersection between risk groups of COVID-19 and zinc deficiency is impressive. In patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), bronchial asthma, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, kidney diseases, dialysis, obesity, diabetes, cancer, atherosclerosis, liver cirrhosis, immunosuppression, and known liver damage low serum zinc levels are regularly observed

Long term higher dose zinc may cause a copper deficiency, which has its own problems. But during illness, needs for zinc probably dramatically increase as our immune system ramps up.

For whatever it’s worth, the RDA is 11mg for men, and 8mg for women. And the upper tolerable intake is 40mg according to Harvard.

Zinc has been used for healing infections since ancient Greek times. It’s not like we didn’t get some warning.

The best sources of zinc are meat, fish and seafood

Six oysters will give you 50mg. A 5oz chuck steak — 15mg and a cup of lentils has 3mg. Oysters are way out ahead. The largest source of zinc for most people is probably steak, and yes, vegetarians are more likely to be deficient.

*The cost of $3.75 was calculated on Australian Chemist Warehouse prices. But currently bulk zinc trades for $3,000 a ton (US) so the base cost is one hundredth of a cent per dose. There is some room for bulk savings, not that anyone in government seems interested in saving taxpayer funds or stopping them dying of basic nutritional deficiencies…

REFERENCE

Abdalla et al (2022) Twice-Daily Oral Zinc in the Treatment of Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019: A Randomized Double-Blind Controlled Trial, Clinical Infectious Diseases

Mayberry et al (2021) Zinc use is associated with improved outcomes in Covid-19: Results from the Crush-Covid registry, Critical Care Medicine 50(1):p 81, January 2022. | DOI: 10.1097/01.ccm.0000807104.82650.d6

Wessels I, et al. (2020) The Potential Impact of Zinc Supplementation on COVID-19 Pathogenesis. Front Immunol. 2020 Jul 10;11:1712. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2020.01712. PMID: 32754164; PMCID: PMC7365891.

 

h/t CraigKelly