“A Dose of This Formula a Day Keeps Viruses Away”: A Supplement Maker's Long Fight With Regulators

Starting in May 2021, Berkeley, California-based Precision Patient Outcomes, Inc. began selling a $34.95 supplement called COVID Resist, containing vitamin C, vitamin D3, vitamin K2, zinc, and the flavonoid quercetin dihydrate. Marketing for the product, posted on the company's website and across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, included lines such as “A dose of this formula a day keeps viruses away . . . and their variants.”DOCUMENTED The company's CEO and co-founder, Margrett Priest Lewis, formulated the product herself and was directly involved in promoting it across the company's channels and her own personal accounts.DOCUMENTED

The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Precision Patient Outcomes (PPO) and Lewis in November 2022, alleging the marketing claims violated the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act and Section 5 of the FTC Act because the company lacked scientific evidence that a vitamin-and-zinc supplement could treat, prevent, or mitigate COVID-19.DOCUMENTED The case that followed ended not with a large penalty, as many similar FTC health-claims cases have, but with a settlement containing no monetary penalty at all — a departure the company's own attorneys have publicly highlighted.

What the FTC alleged

The FTC's complaint centered on a straightforward evidentiary gap: no dietary supplement has been shown to treat, prevent, or cure COVID-19, and PPO's marketing claims for COVID Resist and its successor product, VIRUS Resist, were not backed by the kind of competent and reliable scientific evidence the FTC Act requires for health claims of this specificity.DOCUMENTED Samuel Levine, then Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said at the time that the agency sought “to permanently prohibit companies and company owners engaging in misconduct from endangering the health and well-being of American consumers.”DOCUMENTED The complaint named Lewis individually, alleging she was in direct control of the company's operations and personally promoted the challenged claims.DOCUMENTED

The company's response

Lewis's attorneys at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonprofit legal group representing PPO and Lewis in the litigation, have publicly disputed how the case began.SELF-REPORTED According to statements from that group, Lewis contacted the FTC at the pre-market stage — before selling any product — to ask whether there were problems with the product's proposed name or marketing. The FTC's response, per the group's account, did not directly answer her question but instead provided pages of information about other companies the agency had sued or warned.SELF-REPORTED The group also states that PPO dropped the “Covid” branding and renamed the product on its own initiative before it went to market, and that the FTC's original complaint incorrectly alleged PPO had sold a product literally named “Covid Resist,” an error the agency corrected only after an amended complaint.SELF-REPORTED

Response

Terms of the settlement

The order signed by the court in February 2024 permanently bars PPO and Lewis from claiming that any product prevents or reduces the likelihood of COVID-19 infection or transmission, reduces the severity or duration of COVID-19, or otherwise cures, mitigates, or treats the virus, unless the FDA has approved the specific claim.DOCUMENTED Notably, the order contains no monetary penalty and imposes only a three-year duty for the defendants to report to the FTC — far shorter, and financially far lighter, than many comparable FTC health-claims settlements.DOCUMENTED PPO and Lewis were permitted to continue selling their current product lineup and were not restricted from making other truthful claims about their products beyond the specific COVID-related prohibitions.DOCUMENTED

The settlement order contains no monetary penalty at all — only a three-year duty to report to the FTC, a marked departure from the agency's typical multi-decade compliance terms.

Why the case is a useful marker

Regardless of how the underlying dispute over the FTC's initial approach is resolved in the public record, the settlement itself establishes a clear, court-enforced line: claims that a dietary supplement can treat, prevent, or mitigate COVID-19 require FDA approval, not just consumer marketing confidence, however the ingredients are framed.REVIEWED The case's unusually lenient financial terms, paired with the public dispute over how the investigation began, make it a rare example of an FTC health-claims settlement that ended with both sides publicly characterizing the outcome very differently.

A pattern of pandemic-era health claims cases

The Precision Patient Outcomes case was one of many the FTC brought under the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act, a statute Congress enacted specifically to give the agency civil-penalty authority over pandemic-related deceptive claims that might otherwise have drawn only a cease-and-desist letter.REVIEWED Compared to some of the larger pandemic health-claims cases the agency pursued against bigger companies, the PPO case is notably small in scale — a single founder-run company selling a $34.95 supplement rather than a national retailer or a company with institutional marketing resources — which may itself help explain why the eventual settlement carried no financial penalty, even as the underlying legal prohibition on unproven COVID claims remained fully intact.

For consumers, the throughline across all of the FTC's pandemic-era supplement cases, this one included, remains constant regardless of how any individual dispute over process unfolded: no dietary supplement sold over the counter has been shown to prevent, treat, or cure COVID-19, and marketing language suggesting otherwise — whatever the size of the company behind it — falls outside what federal law permits absent FDA approval.

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