Vitamins in a pharmacy in Paris, November 27, 2017. -

STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP

It provides energy, vitality and a healthy glow, but it also increases our immune defenses.

Vitamin D would help limit respiratory infections and prevent severe forms of the coronavirus, scientists have said.

In a press release, published this Monday by the Angers University Hospital, 73 French-speaking experts and six learned societies - the French Association for the fight against rheumatism, the French Society of Endocrinology, the French Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology, the French Society of Pediatrics , the French Society of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology, the Francophone Society of Nephrology, Dialysis and Transplantation - recommend large-scale distribution of vitamin D.

"A useful adjuvant to help prevent infection"

According to experts, vitamin D would modulate the synthesis of certain proteins such as ACE2 (used by SARS-CoV-2 to infect host cells).

"ACE2 has protective effects against inflammation in several organs, including the lungs," they explain in the press release.

ACE2 is a protein "key in the physiology of Covid-19, necessary for the entry of the SARS-CoV-2 virus into the host's cells", explained the National Institute of Health and Research (INSERM), last May, spotted our colleagues from France Bleu.

But scientists still point out that vitamin D is neither a drug against the coronavirus, nor "a weapon of the same level as vaccination or barrier gestures", but "a useful adjuvant to help prevent infection. by SARS-CoV-2, but also and above all [to reduce] the risk of severe forms of Covid-19, passages in intensive care and death linked to this virus ”.

They recommend distributing vitamin D to infected people "in high doses, and this as soon as the diagnosis of Covid-19 is made" but also to promote "on a large scale vitamin D supplementation", in view of the deficiencies "found in 40 to 50% of the French population and even more among people at risk of severe forms of Covid-19 ”.

The intake of vitamin D is "without risk" if the doses are adapted, this substance being "simple, without danger, inexpensive, reimbursed by the health insurance".

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