Dr. Ronan Glynn:

Just quickly on vitamin D, to be very clear, there are significant levels of vitamin D deficiency across the population, so we would wholeheartedly support any measure to improve supplementation where appropriate and to ensure that people are getting it in the first instance through their diet.

However, we did look at this issue. Our expert advisory group, through HIQA, did an evidence review and it found no evidence to support the view that vitamin D could either prevent Covid in the first instance or was associated with a reduction in severe outcomes for those who were infected.

I am fully on board with supporting vitamin D more broadly, but we have to be careful about how we then extrapolate from that to suggest that it might have a preventative effect for Covid-19 when the evidence does not support that to date.