almost certain that many people will receive significant doses of vitamin C
Not what I said.
Each person will receive vitamin C diluted in the ratio of 10^(-60) (see reference here). The amount is the same for everyone, constant. Strictly one dose per person (as it was one speck per person).
But the number of persons are all people alive in the next 3^^^3 generations.
If there is any causal relationship at all between receiving a dose of vitamin C and flu resistance
...which wouldn't mean it is linear at all. Above a certain dose can be lethal; below, can have no effect.
Does it sound reasonable that if you eat one nanogram of bread during severe starvation, it would retard your death in precisely zero seconds?
Does it sound reasonable that if you eat one nanogram of bread during severe starvation, it would retard your death in precisely zero seconds?
No. You use energy at some finite rate (I'll assume 2000 kilocalories/day, dunno how much starvation affects this). A nanogram of bread contains a nonzero amount of energy (~2.5 microcalories). So it increases your life expectancy by a nonzero time (~100 nanoseconds). A similar analysis can be performed for anything down to and including a single molecule.
"What's the worst that can happen?" goes the optimistic saying. It's probably a bad question to ask anyone with a creative imagination. Let's consider the problem on an individual level: it's not really the worst that can happen, but would nonetheless be fairly bad, if you were horribly tortured for a number of years. This is one of the worse things that can realistically happen to one person in today's world.
What's the least bad, bad thing that can happen? Well, suppose a dust speck floated into your eye and irritated it just a little, for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make you notice before you blink and wipe away the dust speck.
For our next ingredient, we need a large number. Let's use 3^^^3, written in Knuth's up-arrow notation:
3^^^3 is an exponential tower of 3s which is 7,625,597,484,987 layers tall. You start with 1; raise 3 to the power of 1 to get 3; raise 3 to the power of 3 to get 27; raise 3 to the power of 27 to get 7625597484987; raise 3 to the power of 7625597484987 to get a number much larger than the number of atoms in the universe, but which could still be written down in base 10, on 100 square kilometers of paper; then raise 3 to that power; and continue until you've exponentiated 7625597484987 times. That's 3^^^3. It's the smallest simple inconceivably huge number I know.
Now here's the moral dilemma. If neither event is going to happen to you personally, but you still had to choose one or the other:
Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?
I think the answer is obvious. How about you?