Advice circulating in traditional and social media to take vitamin D supplements to help stave off the coronavirus may be premature. The risks associated with taking more vitamin D are low, but there is the very real risk of raising false hope. Indeed, some of the researchers producing the studies linking vitamin D deficiency and coronavirus mortality rates warn against drawing sweeping conclusions about the benefits of taking the supplement.

Entertainment mogul Tyler Perry, for instance, on Instagram urged black people to use vitamin D because he had “read in a study out of Spain, Italy, and China … that a lot of people who died from COVID were low in vitamin D.”

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