Dr. Daniel McCartney:

Could I make a quick comment? To follow up on what Professor Kenny said, there are other health benefits from vitamin D apart from this well-established reduction in and risk of respiratory infection. We are seeing it in testimony from Professor Carlos Camargo in Harvard University. Professor Camargo is perhaps the world authority in this area as it relates to respiratory infection and vitamin D. In a large meta analysis, which Professor Kenny referred to, of 48,000 patients they discovered that when they parsed this and looked just at people who were getting vitamin D supplementation on a day-to-day basis rather than these large bolus doses, there was a 25% reduction in risk of acute respiratory infection. On that basis alone and on the assumption that the SARS-CoV-2 virus does not differ in any huge way from these other acute respiratory infections that would be included in that, we could argue that we should be supplementing vitamin D. There are other benefits also. Some studies suggest, for example, much lower cancer rates in people who are vitamin D replete over time. I refer to osteoporosis and also heart failure, which is responsible for one in four accident and emergency admissions in this country. In all the areas of cardiovascular health vitamin D seems to be beneficial.

I would like to touch on the affordability of vitamin D also because the last two members, Deputy Kenny and Senator Kyne, focused on that. We see approximately half of the rate of supplementation - this is in young women, and I have done research in this area - in people in the lower socioeconomic groups. Anything we can do, therefore, whether that is a VAT exemption for vitamin D or any other intervention we can do to make it more affordable would be very beneficial. We have to embed it into the culture so that, as one of our colleagues mentioned, it becomes well known across the population like folic acid supplementation in pregnancy, for example, but any assistance in terms of affordability, particularly at this time, would be very useful.