The doctor who started the use of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc sulfate on Coronavirus patients

NY Times/Houston Chronicle:

Last month, residents of Kiryas Joel, a New York village of 35,000 Hasidic Jews roughly an hour’s drive from Manhattan, began hearing about a promising treatment for the coronavirus that had been rippling through their community.

The source was Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, 46, a mild-mannered family doctor with offices near the village. Since early March, his clinics had treated people with coronavirus like symptoms, and he had developed an experimental treatment consisting of an antimalarial medication called hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin, and zinc sulfate.

After testing this three-drug cocktail on hundreds of patients, some of whom had only mild or moderate symptoms when they arrived, Zelenko claimed that 100% of them had survived the virus with no hospitalizations and no need for a ventilator.

“I’m seeing tremendous positive results,” he said in a March 21 video, which was addressed to President Donald Trump and eventually posted to YouTube and Facebook.

What happened next is a modern pandemic parable that illustrates how the coronavirus is colliding with our fragile information ecosystem: a jumble of facts, falsehoods and viral rumors patched together from Twitter threads and shards of online news, amplified by armchair experts and professional partisans and pumped through the warp-speed accelerator of social media.

Zelenko’s treatment arrived at a useful moment for Trump and his media supporters, who have at times appeared more interested in discussing miracle cures than testing delays or ventilator shortages.

Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, quickly promoted Zelenko’s claims on his TV and radio shows. Mark Meadows, the incoming White House chief of staff, called Zelenko to ask about his treatment plan. And Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, praised him in a podcast interview this week for “thinking of solutions, just like the president.”

Few people have been as hopeful about hydroxychloroquine as Trump, who has enthusiastically promoted it for weeks as “very effective” and possibly “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine” — even as health experts have cautioned that more research and testing are needed.

That has not deterred Trump’s supporters, who have vilified public health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the most outspoken advocate of emergency virus measures. Instead, some are pinning their hopes on Zelenko and his unproven treatment plan, which has now been seen by millions.
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I think the virulent opposition to the treatment by the left in this country has probably done more to bring this treatment to the public attention than Sean Hannity.  There is a reflexive opposition to anything that the President says by many on the left in this country and especially by the mainstream media which is hostile to things just because the President said them.

Israel has been sending millions of these pills to the US as its donation to try to deal with the virus.  New York is in effect doing clinical trials in the use of the medication to deal with its serious outbreak of the virus.  Left-wing governors in Nevada and Michigan blocked the use of the drug for coronavirus, although the Michigan governor has reversed herself on the issue.

Proponents of the drug cocktail say the patients who are seriously ill should have the right to try the medication.  I do not think the President has said anything false about the treatment.  It sounds like his position is that patients facing death should have the right to try.

The media that once mocked the treatment now is coming around to report some cases where it has been effective.