Bill Whittle once said that it was “just a citizen with a camera-phone” who caught an ill Hillary Clinton falling into the van. I guess it’s our responsibility as citizens and BWDC members to follow up on Covid reports and share what we learn.
I was really curious about Dr. Vladimir Zelenko. A recent Coronasphere Lounge had Bill showing an online interview between Rudy Giuliani and Dr. Zelenko. The story of Zelenko’s Hydroxycloroquine plus zinc plus a Zpak treatments seemed so believable, so logical, with such a good boast of no deaths, I thought to start researching him to see if there was any follow-up. It didn’t take long for me to find the resistance to him posting videos of his success.
To make things really easy, I’ll state my final point here instead of having you find it at the end of the blog post….I looked and looked for any positive backup to the doctor’s claims, and found only one BIG piece of info of support. Most were Anti-Zelenko or Anti Hydroxychloroquine.
He doesn’t have many fans in the MSM or in the digital world.
The New York times Took a stab at him.
Behind a pay wall, but the headline declares Zelenko becomes a right wing star, as you can see by the article’s title photo.
A digital news source (and partner with USAToday) Lohud.com, reports on his own community asking Zelenko to stop posting videos. “Village leaders and community groups issued a joint statement on Tuesday rebuking a local doctor’s predictions about the spread of the coronavirus and urging him to stop posting videos online about the outbreak or else leave Kiryas Joel and the Hasidic community out of them.”
They said those statements had spurred discrimination against its residents and made it difficult to staff local businesses that remain open during the state emergency. However they could only state one actual act of discrimination as “ One possible discriminatory act it may have prompted was captured in a video posted online on Monday, which showed a service employee at Johnstons Toyota in New Hampton turning away a Hasidic customer and telling him he was spreading the virus.”
Nowhere in the article is the group representing Kiryas Joel suggesting that Dr.Zelenko’s results are a fraud, only that they did not appreciate that Zelenko had estimated 90% of Kiryas Joel had COVID-19 after 9 of his first 14 tests came back positive — a conclusion the Orange County health commissioner blasted as irresponsible. Zelenko had posted his video as a ‘warning’ to his community to protect the vulnerable.
In fact, Kiryas Joel leaders said in their letter to Zelenko that he’s an “important and respected health care provider” and that they wrote to him “with heavy hearts.” They welcomed working with him on the coronavirus crisis, but urged him to stop posting videos that are “putting our community in an unfair and undeserved spotlight.”
Snopes.com took a stab at Zelenko
Alex Kasprak, Senior reporter at Snopes did an investigation and dismissed Zelenko’s results as anectodal, unproven. Snopes preferred to dump on the doctor for being a Trump supporter and for discussing his “results” with Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and for not providing “proof”. Kasprak also sprinkled in to his “debunking” the potential side effects of Hydroxychloroquine which, while responsible to note, was not really central to deciding if Zelenko’s work was true or false.
To Snopes’ credit, they did add “In an interview, Zelenko acknowledged that his regimen was new and untested, and that it was too soon to assess its long-term effectiveness.” He (Zelenko) instead argued that “the risks of waiting to verify its efficacy” were greater. This is an assertion with which public health officials largely disagree.”
The interesting thing with Snopes, is that Kasprak can drop a comment like that without producing any proof to back up his claim of “officials largely disagreeing”.
Kasprak and Snopes could only come up with an Unproven verdict, not false or fraudulent.
Stat.com took at Jab at Dr. Zelenko and Hydroxychloroquine
Stat.com, a medical online publication, took hard swings at the use of the Malaria treatment, as wells as the French Study, the Shanghai Study, and other drugs which are being tried. Stat writers Ed Silverman and Matthew Herper, in just 15 days knocked out 11 articles which were all focused on the failures the hydroxychloroquine.
Stat did report 2 articles, both focusing on a new huge Novartis study which will be conducted by Richard E. Chaisson, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and international health at Johns Hopkins University
This, I believe, was the big takeaway from my hours/days of scouring the web for Zelenko information. Why-o-why would Novartis fund a study on the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine, spend precious time and resources on a study that Snopes, AP, MSNBC, Lohud, and the New York Times have declared is a waste of time on a drug who’s only benefit is that Trump promoted the potential in it? Why-o-why would a Johns Hopkins University professor lead such a study which the MSM has declared useless from the start? Perhaps there is a little more than a chance that this malaria drug is effective in some way against the Wuhan Virus?
8 replies on “Dr. Vladimir Zelenko – As good as it seems?”
I listened to the Dennis Prager interview with Dr Zelenko (April 20, hour 3). One of the things I liked was that Zelenko proposed a decent account of the mechanisms by which the drug cocktail would be working. [My editorial comments and slightly educated guesses are in brackets.]
1) Zinc interferes with viral replication. If the virus can’t replicate, it can’t kill your cells. [This may be why zinc lozenges shorten the duration of the common cold.][But zinc can dull your sense of smell and taste if you inhale it as an aerosolized solution. Some people have noticed loss of sense of smell is a symptom of coronavirus. Do the virus and zinc attack the same receptors in the sinuses?]
2) Hydroxychloroquine opens the ion channels [he didn’t use that term] in the cells, allowing zinc inside the cells to work on the virus there. [Maybe too late for that cell, but the viruses being manufactured inside the cell may well get inactivated before release.]
3) The antibiotic is there to prevent secondary infections. [And those can be a problem. I spent Christmas Eve in the hospital because of the flu. The secondary infections in my case were pneumonia and sepsis. Caught very early, so they released me less than 24 hours after I was admitted.]
So it follows that the drug cocktail has to be administered as early as possible in the course of the disease. You want to prevent the damage, since we’re not very good at fixing it. Dr. Zelenko reports that he has started patients on the cocktail as soon as they present with symptoms, figuring he can always stop it if the test for coronavirus comes back negative.
[His success rate seems to be some 99.5%. I don’t know what the norm is for patients at the stages his were when started on the cocktail. But if the normal death rate is as high as 4%, the difference is highly statistically significant.]
[I’m not using the term “control group”, because so far, we’ve yet to see a randomized, controlled study. At best, we’re seeing “differential treatment groups”, and the lack of randomization means we may be seeing confounding variables between groups. So not a gold standard. But maybe a silver or bronze standard?]
I believe that your understanding about zinc is correct. The variations in results in other trials that aren’t administering zinc might be accounted for by the fact that a lot of people take zinc regularly as a supplement, and/or take extra (with Vitamin C) to ward off a cold, or after they get sick. So some hospitalized patients may have taken a lot of zinc in the week before hospitalization, while others may not have.
As for large-scale, randomized trials, which Dr. Fauci keeps mentioning as the “gold standard,” and which news media and other informational sources like Wikipedia keep using as their reason to assert that the treatment is “unproven,” I would like them to explain (a) how you can fault a protocol before enough time has passed to conduct such a study, and (b) how it is ethical, when Dr. Zelenko’s protocol has a 95% (or better) success rate in preventing not only death but intubation, to issue some people a placebo.
In my opinion there are serious flaws in our “gold standard” model of large-scale, randomized trials. I think we should de-throne this so-called “evidence-based medicine” and re-elevate clinically-based medicine, giving doctors and patients more freedom to make their own choices about various treatments. (N.B. this happens, but we pretend it doesn’t.)
My only quibble with the 95% success figure is that we don’t know what the normal success rate would be without the drug cocktail. Without looking over his numbers, I’m not even sure what 95% is actually 95% of.
In this instance I think “success” is “not dying.” If you watch Dr. Zelenko’s interview with Giuliani, he explains that he only gave the “cocktail” to people who were seriously ill, either at risk for hospitalization or already in the hospital. At that time (and I do not know what his later numbers show), he had managed to get most people out of the hospital, and had only four intubations. It’s the latter that is so significant because the survival rate once a person is on a ventilator is something like 12-15%, depending on who you ask.
The FDA’s “guidance” on using HCQ for the Wuhan virus is unconscionable. It is, in effect, a hit job intended to make usage of HCQ fail. It warns that no one should use it except in a hospital setting. The whole point of Dr. Zelenko’s work is to catch the virus early, before the patient needs hospitalization, and to keep them OUT of of the hospital. Following the FDA guidelines ensures that no patient gets HCQ until there’s a high likelihood that it is too late to help them.
Also, it makes no mention of zinc. The whole point of HCQ is that it functions as an ionophore, which means it helps facilitate the ion transfer OF ZINC across the infected cell membrane, where zinc changes the cell’s pH and thereby prevents the virus from replicating.
Fortunately, there are other ionophores that work with zinc and they are over-the-counter, though it’s becoming harder to find them. I have been meaning to post about all this, sorry I haven’t been able to get around to it yet.
Thanks Laura! Other over the counter ionophores?
Yes, sorry, not trying to be coy but I want to write it up properly.
Understood!