Pauling’s 1970 book Vitamin C and the Common Cold extrapolated a large protective effect to the general population chiefly from one placebo-controlled trial of Swiss schoolchildren at a ski camp — a group under unusually severe cold and physical stress, not representative of ordinary life. The 2013 Cochrane systematic review (29 trial comparisons, 11,306 participants) found no reduction in cold incidence in the general community (pooled risk ratio 0.97, 95% CI 0.94-1.00); the roughly halved incidence Pauling generalized from was real, but confined to the narrow subgroup of people under brief extreme physical or cold stress (marathon runners, skiers, subarctic soldiers), not the general population his book addressed. The archive marks the general-population incidence claim refuted; the narrower duration-reduction and stress-subgroup findings are a real, much smaller effect than the claim as popularly understood.