Posted on 07/06/2020 9:42:07 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
‘DEPART from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it’ – Psalm 34:13
It isn’t usual for a doctor to start an interview quoting from Scripture, but Dr Vladimir ‘Zev’ Zelenko sometimes does.
Someone who believes in God and orders his life according to his faith makes a bad start with the secular world. Being a ‘simple country doctor’ – his description – is another downer. A ‘Board Certified Family Practitioner’ is America’s closest equivalent to a British GP; Dr Zev has degrees in chemistry as well as medicine, but chose to practise as the family doctor to a close-living orthodox Jewish community in New York state.
When Covid-19 came to America, Dr Zev had a problem. If it took hold, he realised that it would rip through his community like measles through the native Americans. Unlike the NHS, still insisting – in defiance of the evidence – that ‘there is no treatment’, Dr Zelenko looked around for what the NHS apparatchiks say doesn’t exist, or can only be found in randomised clinical trials taking months to conclude.
He found it from Chinese and Korean reports, and from Professor Didier Raoult in Marseille, with his combination of the old anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine and the equally well-known antibiotic azithromycin, standard for chlamydia, and active also against viruses like Zika and Ebola. He also did some of the reading which the Oxford professors running the RECOVERY clinical trials failed to do.
RECOVERY’s information documents parrot this: ‘Chloroquine blocks virus infection by increasing endosomal pH required for virus/cell fusion, as well as interfering with the glycosylation of cellular receptors of SARS-CoV.’ It’s a word-for-word lift from an early February paper in Nature: Cell Research. Very likely these phenomena are indeed part of the anti-viral mechanism of hydroxychloroquine, but they missed completely something else.
By the second week in March, the idea was being openly discussed in a regular series of medical updates on the coronavirus (though unnoticed by the Oxford professors). The March 10 video now shows over a million views.
Zinc was known since 2010 to poison not just coronaviruses, but other RNA viruses too. It’s why zinc supplements are sometimes tried to prevent colds. It blocks a critical enzyme called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, or ‘replicase’ for short. (Many enzymes are called ‘something-ase’ where ‘something’ hints at what it does). This enzyme is fundamental to the virus’s ability to copy itself. Poison the replicase: it’s ‘game over’ for the virus. There’s one snag: zinc exists in the body as a charged ion, so cannot easily cross cell membranes into the cell where it’s needed. But in 2014 it was found that chloroquine functions as a ‘zinc ionophore’, enabling zinc to cross cell membranes. The cancer researchers who discovered it weren’t thinking about viruses at all, but there it was.
Armed with those two simple facts, Dr Zev did the obvious, and added zinc supplements to the ‘Marseille cocktail’. Thus the ‘Zelenko Protocol’ (zinc, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin) was born.
As Dr Zev now puts it: ‘Zinc is the bullet. Hydroxychloroquine is the gun.’
Some of this was outlined by Joseph Berry here on TCW in May. Azithromycin, originally there to treat bacterial infections on top of the virus, has anti-viral effects of its own, and according to the Marseille team further enhances the anti-viral effect of hydroxychloroquine.
Being possessed of a moral simplicity, Dr Zev instantly shared his results with open letters to ‘medical professionals around the world’ (March 23) with simple summaries, and to President Trump (April 7). A New York Times piece referred to him as a ‘Right-wing hero’. For the American Left, a doctor doing the best for his patients, curing an unknown disease, is now, apparently, being ‘Right-wing’. Trump’s endorsement of hydroxychloroquine set off immediate opposition to the drug from his political opponents; Dr Zev has had to live with that for months. And a full-time GP doesn’t have the time to write academic papers, so is easy to ignore.
That changed on Friday morning, when Dr Zev released a preprint of a long-awaited paper, co-authored with Professor Dr Martin Scholz of the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, and Dr Roland Derwand, who had both previously published on zinc as a co-factor to hydroxychloroquine.
The outcomes from Dr Zev’s medical practice are now available for the world in a research paper. (Actually they always were, but some people pretend they can ignore all evidence not presented in sufficiently formal clothes).
Dr Zev has now seen some 2,200 Covid-19 patients. Having lost one lung himself to a rare arterial sarcoma, he would in the UK probably have been ordered to shelter inside. Instead he sees patients in person, without a mask, confident in the prophylaxis that he takes (hydroxychloroquine and zinc).
He doesn’t treat everyone. Young and otherwise healthy sweat it out (unless they get worse). Only 800 high-risk patients have been treated. These are not patients who would mostly recover anyway, proving nothing much about the treatment. No, they are the ones over 60, those with ‘co-morbidities’ or already short of breath, all of whom have a serious risk of ending up in hospital, or dead. Except on Dr Zev’s treatment, they usually don’t.
Of 141 patients proved to have covid-19 by specific tests, only one died, and only four were hospitalised. The rest recovered at home. Remember these were the high-risk cases, not the easy ones.
To fend off nit-pickers, only the patients with positive tests are included in the report. Not all patients needed testing; around a third had loss of smell or taste, symptoms now recognised as diagnostic for Covid, even in the UK. Not all patients could access tests (Matt Hancock will sympathise), and because results can take days to arrive, when time is of the essence, Dr Zev often starts treatment on clinical diagnosis without waiting for test results.
A bonus lies in a ‘control’ group of patients who didn’t get the ‘Zelenko Protocol’. This silences some of the criticisms routinely levelled at Professor Raoult, which are in effect that he should have deliberately not treated a random selection of his patients to compare the effect of not treating them (which Raoult considers unethical). Dr Zev likewise refuses nobody; the patients going untreated were those going to different medical practices in the same town. Public records give the outcomes. Of 384 untreated, test-positive patients, 13 died (3.4 per cent) and 58 (15.1 per cent) were hospitalised. This is all of the test-positive patients elsewhere in town, high-risk or not.
So Dr Zev’s high-risk patients almost always survive, and few go into hospital. Less than 1 per cent high-risk deaths is distinctly better than the hideous overall mortality of 175 NHS hospitals in the RECOVERY trials, approaching 24 per cent of more than 3,132 patients, or the case fatality rate for the UK, around 14 per cent of all cases.
Dr Zev’s priority is saving lives, without hospitalisation, and he usually succeeds. He knows that there is a limited window (about a week from symptoms) for knocking out the virus before the ‘inflammatory’ phase of the illness sets in. Typically he sees patients within four days of symptoms and most are treated within five days, a unique aspect of his paper.
Early treatment, within days of symptoms, has been emphasised by all successful clinicians for months. Remarkable accounts are now emerging from Brazil, where doctors recognising this have also had to fight political battles, and to be allowed to save lives. In the Amazon estuary city of Belém do Pará, an overwhelmed hospital system actually happened in early May. Patients died in vehicles outside. An early treatment policy, based on the Marseille combination, with drive-through pharmacies issuing medicine packs, transformed the apocalypse in a week.
Fewer than 5 per cent of the patients thus served turned up later at hospital.
Zelenko’s success shows the way of out of lockdowns, saving lives, squashing the epidemic, cleaning up spikes and ‘second waves’. It isn’t hospitals, intensive care beds or a vaccine that doesn’t exist yet and may never do. ‘Test and trace’, when it’s working, will help, but the missing ingredient is early treatment by GPs, using repurposed drugs whose safety is very well-known and which cost next to nothing ($20 per patient). An international petition (to the UK Parliament and Boris Johnson among others) has been started.
The UK death toll now stands at 44,198. Our fatalities are 14 per cent of all cases. Deaths per million are the second worst in the world. Excess deaths are the worst in the G7 countries. The NHS policy of ‘there is no treatment’ has patently failed.
Dr Zev has shown that it does not have to be like this.
“As Dr Zev now puts it: ‘Zinc is the bullet. Hydroxychloroquine is the gun.’”
BUMP
I will watch it. I know he’s doing some telemedicine.
The OTC version is a nasal spray named Budesonide Nasal Spray; the branded version is called Rhinocort. It is used for nasal and sinus inflammation. It is formulated to be shot into your sinuses.
The doctor is using is using a form of the same drug, budesonide, that comes in premeasured plastic holders that are broken open and placed in a nebulizer machine. It is formulated to be inhaled to your lungs and used to treat inflammation. The branded name is different; it is Pulmicort.
So in short there is one steriod medication named budesonide that is sold with two different formulations designed to be delivered to two different parts of your body.
The one the doctor is using for the Wuhan Flu is not the one you can buy OTC and is not designed to be inhaled into your lungs.
If I haven’t been clear let me know
It’s very clear
In theory, some of that OTC should get in your lungs just from snorting it...but perhaps in such a small quantity that it is not going to help you.
Perhaps at the very beginning it might but in essence you need the script version if you are going to try this as treatment.
I agree I would go with the script.
If for no other reason it is designed, formulated to be inhaled safely via a nebulizer into the lungs.
Your lungs would likely not appreciate it if the nasal formula landed there. They could respond with increased, not decreased inflammation.
“Your lungs would likely not appreciate it if the nasal formula landed there. They could respond with increased, not decreased inflammation.”
Hadn’t thought of that.
Good points and yes Quercetin is also a Zinc ionophore and advantageously does not need a prescription.
But HCQ has an edge over other Zinc ionophores that make it more effective. Dr. Zelenko accounted for this performance edge picking up in part from Dr. Didier Raoult, MD, PhD in Marseille, France. This edge is that HCQ blocks the ACE2 receptor which the coronavirus SARS-COV-2 enters the pneumocytes.
HCQ thus has two mechanisms to combat SARS-COV-2:
* pushes Zn into pneumocytes to stop SARS-COV-2 from replicating
* blocks SARS-COV-2 from entry/reentry into pneumocytes
At first, Dr. Raoult was not using Zinc but after he and Dr. Zelenko started communicating directly, Dr. Raoult now uses it.
The reason Dr. Raoult was so successful without Zinc supplementation is because his patients didn’t need it. His initial panel of patients were French and lived in the seacoast region of Marseille. French families drink red wine everyday with meals and red wine is loaded with Zinc. French living around Marseille eat a lot of seafood and seafood is loaded with Zinc especially shellfish.
Adding Zinc sulfate or Zinc picolinate ensures everyone on the regimen has sufficient Zinc in their blood plasma. Otherwise results can be mixed.
I watched the Pinsky interview which was excellent. The topics were familiar from other interviews Zelenko has done but he had a chance to dive into deeper detail and expand on how he sees treatment and prevention.
Ok, there is misinformation on his departure from Kiryas Joel, as expected with the fake news covering anything to do with HCQ and Dr. Zelenko. The doctor makes it clear in his Pinsky interview that this media crime and arrogance is all about sacrificing health to the goal of getting rid of Trump. So it should come as no surprise that reports of Zelenko moving his practice are written with a slant that he was ‘driven out’ or he is held in ‘low esteem’. That slant would be false, nothing could be further from the truth.
But he did leave but the question is what did he leave?
He didn’t leave his patients, he left his healthcare administration organization.
Let’s add some medical real-world context.
MDs often have run-ins with their healthcare organizations. MDs need administrations because most health transactions are financed by some form of insurance versus out of pocket payments. As doctors don’t have the time to be on the phone for hours everyday fighting for insurance coverage for their patients, they settle to be part of a healthcare administration.
Dr. Zelenko was a medical director at Carestier Health which was technically his ‘employer’ but which he entered an agreement to be an MD as part of their healthcare administration. But these agreements become blurred over time as health administrators start treating MDs as mere hired help while MDs treat their health administrators as secretarial assistants.
It’s a bit of a afterthought development in American health delivery as MDs carry all the liability and responsibility whereas health administrators do not. So it’s easy to expect conflict built into the arrangement.
What happens when a health administrator gets uppity and starts arguing with one of their an MD providers who is popular among patients?
Some health administrators are known to take the view “I’m the boss and I set policy and if you don’t like it, you can leave and I’ll hire (sign up) another provider to replace you”. In most American business, this type of view is understood as par for the course.
But this interaction is different when it comes to MDs. When an MD announces they are leaving their current health provider organization, it’s different because the MD’s patients have a choice to follow their MD if they can.
In Dr. Zelenko’s case, he moved his administrative services agreement to Monsey Health Center:
https://monsey.info/monsey-news/703384/dr-zelenko-joins-monsey-practice
Monsey, NY is about 5 to 10 miles from Kiryas Joel and it’s almost a certainty that most of Dr. Zelenko’s patients kept their choice with him.
RE: At first, Dr. Raoult was not using Zinc but after he and Dr. Zelenko started communicating directly, Dr. Raoult now uses it.
This is good news. Two of the world’s foremost users of HCQ + Azithromycin + Zinc to treat Covid-19 can now exchange notes.
BTW, how did you get this information? Is it reported anywhere at all? A link would be useful. Thanks.
Red wine also has a fair amount of quercetin but, as you mentioned, the HCQ is better. No doubt about that, as we both know, but in the absence of HCQ, quercetin (with zinc) is a good substitute (and WAY better than nothing).
It was shared by Dr. Zelenko during an interview given by Rabbi Katzin. Drs. Zelenko and Raoult are part of a whatsapp group where they discuss findings and share ideas.
Dr. Zelenko supports Quercetin as a prophylactic and as a substitute for HCQ when politics prevent or impede prescription of HCQ.
Interesting to know, thanks.
Just back from a business trip. Great article and comments. I wish someone would ask Dr. Fauci what he thinks of ionophores, and is he aware of the 2014 discovery regarding HCQ and zinc based on the ionophore action? Or, since he is retired, does he keep up with the relevant current literature? Or, is he more interested in helping develop the high price Remdesivir market, rather than helping the masses stop illness on an out-patient basis at very low cost? And if he is not interested in helping in the early stages of illness, is he any longer following his Hippocratic Oath? Please pass these questions on to your favorite media person.
500 mg/day
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