Free Markets Hate Free (and even cheap)

Caveat Emptor

I was reminded again recently how much free markets don’t like free, or even cheap.

I was visiting an eye doctor for the first time in forty years. During the intake history I told her I had worn glasses from the age of ten till nearly the age of 40.

One day I had rolled my kayak coming in through ocean surf, and lost my glasses. As luck would have it, I had just read Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing on the vision improvement techniques pioneered by Dr. William Bates.

The Bates Method is a set of exercises which strengthen and tune-up the muscles of the iris, lens, and eyeball, as well as useful information of how we see, and how to relax and care for the eyes.

I did the exercises in the book for a few weeks and experienced an astounding improvement in my vision. The headaches which frequently had occurred when I read for more than a few hours disappeared entirely. I had a class 4 (taxi) driver’s license and was able to pass the next eye test for that license easily without glasses, when before I had needed glasses to pass the eye exam.

I told the eye doctor all this, and her response was: “Bates Method - Never heard of it!”

Here I had just told her about how I had achieved 40 years of excellent vision for free. And this ‘eye doctor’ clearly did not want to know about it - even now!

I’m guessing probably only ten percent of the people reading this have ever heard of the Bates Method, even though many of you probably wear glasses, and would love to avoid the expense and hassle of glasses.

Why isn’t the Bates Method better known? Unfortunately it’s free. Eye doctors make lots of money promoting eyeglasses, contact lenses, and laser surgery. They would make precisely nothing turning you on to the Bates Method, and they would likely lose you as a steady customer in the bargain.

Something very similar happens with medical products. Robert Malone this week talked about the almost criminal failure to promote vitamin D supplementation in North America.

The official Recommended Daily Allowance for vitamin D is very low. It is designed to prevent the once common bone disease of rickets, but it is far below the level needed for optimum health.

The body is able to make Vitamin D in the skin, using the energy of sunlight - which is fine in the summer if you get outside regularly. But the large majority of North Americans are vitamin D deficient in the winter months, particularly people with dark skin, and those living at Northern latitudes.

There has long been compelling evidence that vitamin D aids the body in fighting off respiratory infections of all kinds. To quote Dr. Malone: “When Vitamin D3 is given prophylactically at sufficient doses, there is clear and compelling evidence that Vitamin D blood levels of around 50 ng/ml will substantially reduce symptomatic infection, severe disease and mortality.”

In 2006, the US Department of Defense was researching why flu made some soldiers very sick, while others recovered quickly and easily. The DOD found a strong inverse correlation between flu severity and levels of Vitamin D in the blood. The DOD informed Anthony Fauci about their findings and was told by Fauci that US policy was to control influenza with vaccines. Fauci had zero interest in doing further research on how prophylactic Vitamin D supplements could reduce serious illness and mortality associated with seasonal flu.

Dr. Malone estimates that, if the US government had confirmed the DOD’s findings with their own research, and then actively promoted vitamin D supplementation over the next decade, 160,000 of the people who died of seasonal flu would not have died.

Very early in the COVID pandemic there were studies showing a very strong negative correlation between COVID severity/mortality and Vitamin D levels in the blood. While it was possible that COVID was somehow destroying the body’s vitamin D, given the known protective effect of high levels of vitamin D in respect to other respiratory viruses, the medical system should have immediately pushed vitamin D research into high gear. (It would have been easy enough to search out COVID patients who had recently given blood, for example, to confirm whether the low Vitamin D levels existed prior to the onset of COVID in those with severe disease.)

After the fact, we now have abundant evidence that hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved during the COVID pandemic if vitamin D supplementation had been promoted from the beginning. Even the title of this Meta-analysis tells you everything you need to know:

Borsche L, Glauner B, von Mendel J. COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status, and a Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved at 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D3: Results of a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients. 2021;13(10).

What’s more, even if we had simply halved the COVID death rate, it would have taken the death rate from COVID down to being the equivalent of an extremely bad seasonal flu - concerning, but not the end of the world. We would have been much more likely to get through the COVID years without going full-blown crazy with the runaway panic of lock-downs, school closures, and vaccine mandates.

If Vitamin D supplements had cost hundreds of dollars per person - and better yet if someone had patented said supplements - I’m willing to bet we would have seen massive research efforts on Vitamin D in the early weeks of the COVID pandemic. (Who knows, they might have even forced you to take Vitamin D if it was expensive enough!)

But because Vitamin D supplements cost only pennies a person, Big Pharma and their bought-and-paid-for partners at the CDC worked very hard to ignore the life-saving potential of this common nutrient.

Robert Kennedy certainly has his work cut out for him.