Listen: The Empty Promise of Vitamins
Supplements claiming to “boost your immune system” have gotten new attention during the pandemic. On the podcast Social Distance, the staff writer James Hamblin explains why these claims are mostly nonsense (and have been for years), and the executive producer Katherine Wells asks him about vitamins.
Listen to their conversation here:
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What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.
Katherine Wells: I just got a news alert: FDA withdraws approval of malaria drugs touted by Trump. Hydroxychloroquine, I assume, is what they’re talking about?
James Hamblin: It had an emergency-use authorization, which is different from the long process that is required to prove that a drug helps. If there’s some plausible reason to think it might, it gets emergency use authorization. Here, we didn’t really have that, but we did have political pressure from the president, who had touted the drug as a miracle and actually encouraged people to try it at press conferences. Then suddenly it gets this emergency-use authorization. And a lot of people—a lot of —said:
