The text and graphics here are the work of an electronic technician who is attempting to discuss the latest research and how to solve some pressing, global, health problems.

This material is not be confused with medical advice, which is what you get from your chosen healthcare professional after she or he has examined you.

I do attempt to persuade readers regarding how to understand what is happening and what can be done to improve everyone's health.  I do this as an ordinary person, not as an expert.  This is on the basis that I am addressing people who have professional qualifications in these fields or who - lacking such qualifications - have chosen to make their own decisions about health matters, and take full responsibility for the consequences of these decisions.

This site generates no revenue.  I do not sell anything regarding health and nutrition.  I have no financial or other interests in nutrient suppliers.

Three other websites point here: VitaminDStopsCOVID.com, VitaminDStopsCOVID19.info and VitaminDStopsCOVID19.com.   The aim here is to raise awareness of the importance of vitamin D in general, and in particular the role vitamin D deficiency plays in severe COVID-19 symptoms and in the increased viral shedding which drives its spread.

This site and the infographic on the main page ../ is solo project.  Although I work with vitamin D researchers and advocates, I created this my own way without checking with anyone else - with the exception of what I wrote on the main page about the the three vitamin D compounds, endothelial protection, autocrine and paracrine signaling and the one hormonal function of circulating 1,25OHD.  An earlier version of this was checked a few weeks ago by a senior vitamin D researcher and found to be good.   It is important to correct the common misunderstanding that "vitamin D" in general - or just the 1,25OHD form which activates receptors - is a hormone.  The one hormonal function is circulating 1,25OHD.

Some MDs, researchers and vitamin D advocates are working towards an Open Letter advocating robust vitamin D supplementation for essentially all people in the world, since only a few percent of the world's population get enough vitamin D3 all year round from UVB exposure and limited food sources.  (More on this effort below.)  What you read here is not directly tied to such work or to any organisation or group.

Although I argue that population-wide vitamin D supplementation aiming for 50ng/ml (125nmol/L) 25OHD levels will mean there is no need for vaccines to protect against COVID-19 or influenza, arguments about the potential dangers of vaccines are not the concern of this site.   I am simply arguing that proper nutrition would do a much better job, with less expense, no medical involvement and numerous other health benefits - so vaccines for these particular diseaseswould not be necessary.  This is on the basis that COVID-19 and influenza severe symptoms are highly dependent on the weakened and dysregulated immune system responses which are caused primarily by inadequate vitamin D and which will be greatly alleviated or eliminated by the robust vitamin D supplementation I and many others are advocating.   Some common cold viruses are like this too.   There are many other diseases for which vaccines are a good - or the  only choice - for prevention.

Hopefully some nutritionists, MDs, nurses, researchers and nutrition advocates will like what they see here and will support what I have written to some extent at least.  If you spot any mistakes, or think I have misunderstood or misrepresented something, please let me know.  I don't care that what I write here is at odds with conventional guidelines.   However, if you know of actual observations which contradict what I write - including the research I cite - please let me know.   Please also point me to other sites and research articles of interest.

If you like some of what I write here - especially my suggestion for vitamin D supplementary quantities as a ratio of bodyweight - please let me know.  If you link approvingly to parts of this site from your own site, I would like to know about this, acknowledge your support and provide links to your site.  


I was born in Wantage, south of Oxford, west of London in 1955 and since 1961 have lived in Australia.   My wife Tina and I live in Daylesford, north west of Melbourne, Victoria.   I am an electronic technician specialising in musical instruments .  I am also a C++ computer programmer working with mining optimisation and music synthesis.  I contributed to the Csound synthesis language. 

In 2011 I wrote to the major Restless Legs Syndrome [WP] researchers with my opioidic, dopaminergic, dysregulated soft-touch-activated foot withdrawal reflex circuit etiological hypothesis of RLS.  I guess they get a lot of people writing to them with pet theories, and none of them took any interest.  I received some appreciative feedback from some RLS sufferers and two neurologists.  The etiology of RLS is still officially a mystery.  As far as I know, my hypothesis is the only comprehensive explanation for most aspects of this common neurological disorder.  One day I will write this up as an open access peer-reviewed journal article, but it is a lot of work and the open access fees cost a few thousand US dollars.

Since about 2018 I have been planning a website to highlight particularly interesting research into some under-recognised nutrients, including especially vitamin D, boron and omega 3 fatty acids.  I have boxes of articles here to read and annotate and one day I hope to pursue this too, at 5 Neglected Nutrients: https://5nn.info, which is currently empty.  The main part of my boron research library is pictured here.  The vitamin D and potassium / sodium / blood pressure / stroke research libraries are bigger still.  

In January 2020 I became alarmed about the Wuhan coronavirus.  In February and March I wrote extensively about it at the Quillette Circle closed web forum, attached to the excellent sociological article and discussion site https://quillette.com .

By late March I realised that weakened and/or dysregulated immune responses were causing some people with COVID-19 to be seriously harmed or killed, and that nutritional deficiencies, particularly of vitamin D, are driving a lot of this and must be fixed, globally, as a matter of extreme urgency.   I began writing to experts, the WHO STAG-IH etc. about the need for new vitamin D factories and a global repletion program.  Then I added a page to my aminotheory.com website: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/ and have been adding to it until mid-October 2020, by which time the main page there had become unreasonably long.

I also spent most of July tackling the problem of some fake articles by Mark Alipio, "Raharusun" and "Glicio" regarding vitamin D and COVID-19, and created a website devoted to these and the other 20 or so articles which were part of the same program of academic fraud:  https://researchveracity.info/ .

I founded the NISH list (below) in June and was hoping to bring together enough vitamin D specialist researchers and MDs for them to make a decisive and influential statement about the need for robust vitamin D supplementation for most people.  This never occurred.  These people are much harder to herd than cats!  I got to know some of these people and vitamin D advocates.

Karl Pfleger and Gareth Davies took the initiative to gather the most prominent vitamin D researchers to write an Open Letter to world leaders and MDs regarding the need for robust vitamin D supplementation to tackle the COVID-19 crisis.   They are pursuing this in a way which I though was not bold enough, but I got no support for my idea of how to proceed.  The ratio-based vitamin D supplementation suggestion I have on this website is the first public version of what I proposed for the Open Letter.

I have been trying to support MDs and researchers by drawing their attention to research articles of interest, such as the little known but vitally important articles on vitamin D deficiency in children with Kawasaki disease https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#2015-Stagi and the likewise beautiful work by McGregor et al. on the precise cellular mechanisms by which autocrine signaling in the Th1 lymphocytes of severe COVID-19 patients fails to turn these cells onto their anti-inflammatory program, due solely to the lack of 25OHD vitamin D: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/icu/#2020-McGregor .  I will continue to do this - including highlighting how almost all of vitamin D's functions in the body involve autocrine and sometimes paracrine signaling, which is completely unrelated to vitamin D's one well-known hormonal role in calcium-bone metabolism.

I was - and still am - hoping to support MDs and other properly qualified people to take the best actions regarding advice on nutritional supplements and treating hospitalised patients, such as with 25OHD.  (I was arguing for this well before the stunning Cordoba trial results were published.)

However, in late October 2020 - instead of hoping that my efforts would prompt other, fully qualified, people would take a leadership role in awakening the entire world to vitamin D's crucial role in fighting COVID-19 - I decided to make this infographic and new website.

I had never seen rising and falling seasonal vitamin D levels depicted alongside the falling and rising graphs of COVID-19 case numbers, hospitalised patients and deaths.  

I am not trying to develop a reputation as someone who can reliably advise people on nutrition.  That is a very serious business.   I have tried to write a good analysis of the research and have suggested ratio based supplementation guidelines which I hope will be widely supported, or at least prompt the creation of something better.

In doing this I have one great advantage not available to the MDs and researchers.  Their careers are at stake when they suggest something out of the ordinary - and the ordinary in medicine is often dull and sometimes completely broken.

I can make a complete fool of myself, in public, regarding nutrition and it won't matter a hoot to my work in electronics or computer programming.   So I can write exactly what I think is best, without worrying about who it might be upset.

Doctors, in particular, are highly vulnerable to criticism, no matter how unsoundly based.  This is all the moreso in an age of vicious social media and global panic about COVID-19.   There is a word in the English language which should not be uttered, even quietly, within 50 metres of any good doctor.  I will not mention it here, but you know the one - it concerns the sound made by a particular subset of waterbirds.

Doctor's literally cannot afford such words to be mentioned about them.   For me, it would be of no consequence - water off a d.....

I want widespread attention for my work, which unfortunately means some attention to me.   The reputation I am keen to develop is not one of an expert on nutrition etc. but along the lines of:

Nutrition and health is a serious business.  You should only take advice from people who you choose very carefully.  Generally I suggest not seeking such advice from anyone who lacks the training, academic qualifications, board certification and ongoing professional experience which nutritionists, doctors, nurses and some other healthcare professionals have.

I have no formal qualifications in any field whatsoever.  Although I know more about vitamin D and a few other aspects of nutrition than the average bear, I urge you not to view what you read here as medical or nutrition advice.   I don't want that sort of responsibility.

What you read on this site and at https://aminotheory.com is the best efforts of an electronic technician to link to and discuss the most pertinent research.   In a few clearly delineated instances I propose my own hypotheses, draw my own conclusions and propose what I think would be good courses of action for other people in general.  

If you take full responsibility for your own decisions, there's plenty of interesting stuff here.   My fortes are:

1 - Finding interesting research.

2 - Drawing attention to the most interesting parts of this research and explaining it in ways which make it more accessible than the original article.

3 - Linking these together in ways which I think are helpful and in some cases which do not seem to have been thought of before.

4 - Modifying diagrams and graphs from research articles and creating my own based on this research.

5 - Writing about it all on these sites, in the NISH email discussion list (below), and in any other discussion lists, comments sections, web forums etc. which I participate in.

6 - I am learning to tweet!  https://twitter.com/RobinWhittle3/  I do not use Facebook or other social media.  Twitter is nuts - the primary attraction is the 280 character limit on what can be written.  I wouldn't bother with it except for the ability to attach highly informative images.

You should of course read and consult very widely indeed as part of your research.

If you don't take responsibility for your health decisions, then you need to decide on one or more people to advise you.  By all means read the material here and ask your advisors to read it too.  You may find what I write interesting and persuasive, but please remember, I am an electronic technician and not a doctor.

Good doctors and other healthcare professionals strive continually to build and maintain an extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge, experience and skills with which to tackle practically boundless matters of physical, emotional, cognitive and occasionally spiritual / existential health.   They can examine you and advise you personally.

There's a great deal of room for improvement in how most members of the medical profession understand vitamin D and other aspects of nutrition.  My websites are intended to facilitate this. 

In general, doctors are not well trained in nutrition - they tell me this themselves.  The last ten years has seen a great deal of progress in vitamin D research.  The volume of research is overwhelming and most doctors do not have the time or expertise to sift through it all to find the most important and reliable work.  So they tend to rely on government and professional body guidelines.  These are the product of committees and are sometimes at odds with the best current research, since these committees are very loath to admit their previous work was i some way wrong.

I hope these pages will contribute to the improvement of these guidelines, including abandoning the current slice-and-dice approach to vitamin D supplementation quantity recommendations, where age is used as a proxy for bodyweight and, for instance, all people aged 1 to 17 are binned together, no matter what their bodyweight, and assigned a particular recommended intake.   Furthermore, with the exception of quantities for newborns and perhaps some young children, these existing guidelines recommend inadequate quantities of vitamin D.

If you have a serious interest in nutrition and immune system health, please consider joining the email discussion list I established in June 2020: the Nutrition for Immune System Health (NISH) list.   The details are at:


You can enter your email address there, but it would be best, instead, to write to me:


and tell me about yourself so I can introduce you to other list members.  The NISH list is a discussion list, not an agreement list.   It for this purpose solely - not to lobby as a group or make any proposals.   Our members include MDs and nutritionists from many countries.  Three senior vitamin D researchers - each with 15 years or more experience and long publication histories - are also members.   We have some prominent advocates and our membership includes people like me, with no formal qualifications.   However, this is not for dabblers - you need to have a very keen interest in nutrition the immune system and the numerous illnesses which arise from dysregulated immune responses, including chronic, low-grade inflammation.


Karl Pfleger PhD in the USA and Gareth (Gruff) Davies PhD have established an email discussion group for the express purpose of bringing an end to the vitamin D deficiency pandemic, by way of an Open Letter to MDs and leaders of governments in all countries.   They are working with the foremost vitamin D researchers and are aiming to gain a wider endorsement from researchers and MDs in other fields, including infectious diseases, epidemiology and immunology.

If you are an MD, nurse, nutritionist, researcher or serious vitamin D advocate, please get involved with this effort, by writing to Karl and Gareth, whose email addresses you can find via the above two links.

With the exception of quoted material, everything at this site is copyright Robin Whittle 2020 and onwards.

Since my purpose is to promote discussion of these matters, please quote freely from what I write, with proper attribution by way of a link to the page where you found the text.  

Do not copy whole pages or slabs of text and graphics anywhere!   I update these pages and don't want out-of-date and so potentially misleading copies of it floating around on other websites, forums etc.

Please do link to the pages as you like, or print copies to give to your friends and chosen healthcare professionals.   The URLs are quite stable.