FROM THE ARTICLE:
(SNIPPETS COPIED )
He has partnered with two German doctors — themselves appalled at the political dimensions of the pandemic in the U.S. — to analyze data from more than 1,000 of his patients.
He said he consulted with health officials and doctors from Latin America, South Africa and Ukraine about his use of a three-drug cocktail — hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin and a zinc supplement — on asymptomatic patients outside of hospital settings.
Zelenko insists he has been cautious, prescribing the cocktail only to patients at high risk for Covid-19 because of their age or other medical conditions, or those experiencing serious symptoms from the disease.
When Zelenko decided in March to begin giving even asymptomatic patients the hydroxychloroquine cocktail, there was little evidence supporting any kind of treatment for coronavirus. Based on his own reading of the limited studies, he decided that the drug — which has antiviral properties and has been used for decades to treat malaria and rheumatoid arthritis — could be combined with azithromycin and zinc to safely keep patients out of the hospital.
“I’m not claiming any miracle cures,” he told me when we first spoke, in March. “But I have observed that early intervention with my above-mentioned regimen seems to have very positive results.”
But Zelenko was not alone in experimenting with hydroxychloroquine. Some doctors across the country prescribed the drug for themselves, as prophylaxis. Dr. Joseph Rahimian, an infectious-disease specialist at NYU Langone Health, said that early on he and his colleagues turned to the same drug triumvirate in their desperation to help patients critically ill with Covid-19.
“Zinc has some potential antiviral activity, and hydroxychloroquine is an ionophore, which means it helps zinc get into the cells, and may help zinc’s activity,” Rahimian explained, in reasoning similar to Zelenko’s. “We didn’t have any other options at the time.”
Rahimian’s analysis of those efforts, released earlier this month, found that the addition of zinc helped hospitalized patients who were never admitted to the intensive-care unit get home sooner, though he said that the cocktail’s overall effectiveness would not be clear until formal clinical trials were completed.
Dr. Rosy Joseph, a New Jersey rheumatologist who had been prescribing patients hydroxychloroquine for decades, also began treating presumptive Covid-19 cases with it based on a protocol published by Massachusetts General Hospital.
“In general, I’m quite a conservative physician,” Joseph said in March. “But we give this medication with barely a second thought.”
On March 17, Dr. David Boulware, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, began a clinically controlled study on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in treating presumptive positive patients outside hospitals. In a recent tweet, he said that patient safety for the study so far has been good.
After reading these, you tell me if this is pure religion or if there is medical science behind it.
Sarcasm.