(Sadly, Dr Zelenko passed away in June 2022 after a long fight with cancer. An obituary is here)
Interviewed on the Highwire by Del Bigtree 3 July 2020 {https://thehighwire.com/}
Dr. Zelenko comes on about 42 mins in. (Prior interviewees: John Ziegler, Senior columnist; Reinette Senum, Mayor Nevada City, CA)
Approximate transcript (may be incomplete at the beginning)
Referring to Didier Raoult’s work and others…they were doing it in the lab or patients in the hospital. My patients were outpatients. The best solution to the respiratory crisis is to prevent people from being (respiratory something). We had to treat patients with something…but I was comfortable doing this because these are all old drugs. HCQ is 65 years old and has been used – is currently being used by 65 million people. I’ve been using it with my patients for two decades, I knew its safety profile. We give it to pregnant women, to children. Same for Azithromycin…and zinc is a simple mineral. They are all FDA approved, used in a novel way – I didn’t see any problem with that. Off-label, doctors are licensed to do that.
Extremely important – based on clinical suspicion, Treated within 1st 5 days of symptoms…I noticed most patients come day 4 or 5. They wait a day or 2 to see, then wait to see a Dr.
On about 6 the viral load explodes.
The testing took 3 days to get back. By then the infections is worse. Not a reason not to treat.
1/3 of negative tests are wrong. Took clinical decision. I didn’t treat everyone, 99% of those under 60 or with no conditions recovered normally. I didn’t treat them unless they got worse. The high risk population, or anyone who was short of breath, those people had a 5-10% chance of dying. If you look at the hospitals, these were the older patients, patients with cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, those are the patients to treat.
As soon as someone gets the virus,
… that’s an enzyme that lives in the cell – and the virus uses that enzyme to make copies of itself and spread. Zinc inhibits the functioning of that enzyme. So basically it stops the virus from growing. The trouble with zinc is it has trouble getting inside a cell. For biological reasons. Zinc is an ion…like oil and water. It has trouble getting inside the cell. All HCQ does in this context is, it opens up a transport channel, a canal that lets zinc go into the cell. That’s important as that’s where the virus is and that’s where the enzyme is that is using the enzyme to grow. So by allowing the zinc to get into the cell it becomes an effective weapon in killing the virus. And the antibiotic is there for protecting the patient from pulmonary complications; from developing secondary bacterial pneumonias – which is the maoin cause why people were developing respiratory distress, ARDS, and getting on ventilators.
Analogy. Zinc is the bullet, HCQ is the gun and the Az is the vest that protects the patient. The whole treatment costs $20. It’s also good that it’s something patients can take orally; not a shot which causes logistical problems.
The cost isn’t a small factor if we’re going to roll something out globally it needs to be practical, and not cost thousands of dollars (the other medicines are good but…).
RD’s proven characteristic is that it reduces the time patients are in hospital – it’s only for patients in hospital. It reduces on average from 10 days to five days. That’s not a small thing but it’s only used in the hospital setting. My approach is to keep the people out of the hospital.
DB: How much success did you have, keeping people out of the hospital? A: I (and my team) saw 2200 patients with Covid-19; we risk stratified them and only 800 received the medication treatment. {Slide shows underlying Covid-19 risk factors: Age, male sex, obesity and underlying illness}
You would have expected a 5% mortality rate in this country, or 40 deaths.
DB: And how many deaths did you end up having?
Dr Z: Two.
DB: That’s a gigantic difference. What would be the arguments against your protocol – what are they saying about why you can’t trust it. Is anyone pushing back against those numbers?
Dr Z: The debate is an ideological debate. It’s a debate between real world medical evidence, valid medical information and only data obtained from a clinical trial considered valid. There was an article printed in the NEJM earlier this year where the conclusion was that and only data obtained from a clinical trial considered valid, and outside of that is called anecdotal. According to that definition my data is anecdotal.
That’s a big anecdote. If someone is drowning in the ocean and I have a piece of driftwood, I don’t need a clinical trial to tell me to give him the driftwood. He may get a splinter but I’m going to hold on to the best available option. I’m not against clinical trials I’m just for common sense.
DB comments: you are in an extreme situation in both cases. You are in the middle of an epidemic in which every leading expert says they don’t understand it, let’s be honest…one study says asymptomatic aren’t spreading it at all and one says they are. If I was ill I wouldn’t want to hold back on being treated by something that other doctors round the world say they are having success with, and wait to be treated by another doctor who is sticking to a protocol written by people who say they are confused by the illness and who are saying just make them comfortable, don’t give them oxygen…and put on a ventilator which you say is killing 8 or 9 out of 10 of them.
DB: Have you had discussions with Didier Raoult or other Drs around the world that were using HCQ, was there any – how much interaction is happening in science around the world – do you guys talk to each other?
Dr Z: I haven’t spoken to him directly but indirectly via emails. We use each others’ work. He started using zinc which was a derivative of my work, he was using HCQ and Az because of his work
DB:…it felt like Andrew Kuomo really pushed back against HCQ – what was the feeling in New York, did everybody jump to it, or hold off on the use of this drug?
Dr Z: Many of my patients were in terror after this executive order took away their access to this medication….my patients started scrambling to..New Jersey (etc?) to get access to these medications.
…
I’m self employed and don’t have to answer to any hospital system and can practice medicine for the best as I see it. I could aim for maximum benefit and minimum harm. I can understand why there was opposition in some circles when there’s a drug that makes $3200 when the patients get to hospital and if they are treated they don’t get to hospital it’s bad for the companies. But it’s good for the patients and that’s all I care about. I saw so much death and misery…(?)
…
DB: When Trump was advocating for HCQ and Fauci was saying we need more clinical trials we didn’t know then that Fauci had had success in dealing with corona viruses all the way back to 2005. I find it a little shocking that he was talking about it as though it was the first time and this was a brand new approach to coronavirus when there is science that dates back quite a way.
Then we start hearing about these side effects, heart attacks,
We’ve just found out just a couple of weeks ago that…there’s two big studies, the SOLIDARITY trial and the RECOVERY trial – the WHO had SOLIDARITY and the other was Oxford – an investigation into these trials that were supposed to be looking at…lifesaving treatments (a great article in Age of Autism that got into it…found they were using fatal doses of HCQ, in the neighbourhood of 2400 mg
The HCQ dosing regimen used in the Recovery trial was 12 tablets during the first 24 hours (800mg initial dose, 800 mg six hours later, 400 mg 6 hrs later, 400 mg 6 hours later), then 400 mg every 12 hours for 9 more days. This is 2.4 grams during the first 24 hours, and a cumulative dose of 9.2 grams over 10 days.
Since you actually work with it, is it fair to call 2400 mg a day a fatal dose? Do you think that is overdosing, from your perspective?
Dr Z: Not if you’re treating a very fat elephant.
Bigtree laughs…
I was using 400 a day.
DB: Didier Raoult was using something like 600 mg a day
Professor Didier Raoult’s group in Marseille used 600 mg daily for up to ten days in 1061 Covid-19 patients, and reported 8 deaths, a mortality rate of 0.75%, all over 74 years of age. The mortality rate reported by Landray and Horby in the Recovery trial is 34 times higher.
Dr Z: because he wasn’t using zinc. If you use zinc, you need lower dosing.
DB: So where did the zinc come from, we only heard the voice of Didier Raoult, with Az…
Dr Z: they were using it in the far east, in SK, China. I saw some …limited studies..it’s more the basic science made sense. Zinc is a virus killer, and if you get the zinc to where the virus is, it makes sense – like a gun and a bullet, you need both, one is ineffective. You don’t need so much of the HCQ if you use zinc.
DB: Is there any benefit to taking zinc as a supplement right now, or is it only going to be useful the way you have described?
Dr Z. You are asking an excellent question – is there any value to prophylaxis. The answer is yes, and I’m doing work on that right now. I personally take HCQ and zinc as I have some health issues, I have one lung. I’m a doctor, coming into contact with sick patients. And most of the smart Drs I know take it because they don’t want to get sick. And because it’s so safe. Zinc alone probably has minimal benefit, you need to be able to get the zinc into the cell. There is another option, an actual supplement called quercetin. It has similar effect to HCQ. There’s not much data on it so I won’t advocate it, however if a patient can not get HCQ or can’t take it for whatever reason, I’ll use that as plan B.
DB: Turning to the media…a very bad study (shows the VA study) , people that were already end stage…why do you think the media have been so prone, to want to see HCQ fail – what do you think is behind that, it’s not just Gilead. It seemed to me the moment Trump said he liked it,…do you feel there’s politics getting in the way? or is it just money, what are your thoughts.
Dr Z I think there are four reasons. Politics, financial conflicts, arrogance and the fourth is fear. Politics – we’re just before a major election. If the president wins again, he’ll probably shift the judiciary even more to the right, and people that oppose him don’t want that to happen. So there is a lot of political opposition against the president and when he supported HCQ publicly, (if it’s a cure) it’s going to be a huge political win for him, also because it would reopen the economy. I’m not making my own personal view point, just a political analysis of what I see. I’ve come across political forces that are willing to sacrifice …life…and let the economy burn in order to damage the chance of getting the president re-elected. I do believe that.
Also financial conflicts of interest have invested billions of dollars – I’ve got nothing against them – (sound unclear) … taking 95% of their business. Putting them out of business. And they’re not happy about that. Third was the arrogance of the elite in monopolizing the flow of information, they feel only information that comes through their hands can be used as the valid basis for treatment. We deal with the life and death all the time and our observations are not valid. (Indistinct) We didn’t evolve through clinical trial but through experience, what does and doesn’t work. What gave us a survival benefit we incorporated and that which didn’t, died out. So what they are doing is not only against what human history has been like but it’s such a level of …I don’t even want to say corruption, because since they control the flow of medical information…and you know a lot of the recommendations of the WHO were based on fraudulent studies. There’s such a lot of fraud.
DB: You’re talking about the Lancet study which was retracted. Surgisphere claimed to have all that data but were unable to produce that data. So you have a small study with 800 patients like yours – so are there any nations that have adopted HCQ that didn’t push back against it and that can do a comparative…that we could reference to see that even though it’s anecdotal, …anecdote gets more and more powerful the larger the group of people involved. Are there any nations..
Dr Z. I’ve personally been consulted by several governments. I’ve given them my recommendations and my protocols. For example the entire country of Honduras are following the Zelenco protocol.
{News clip: Honduran President, Echoing Trump, Promotes Unproven Treatment for COVID-19
Controversial statements by President Donald Trump about methods to prevent or even treat COVID-19 have raised alarm, yet again, about the way he communicates information regarding the handling of the emergency. On April 24, Trump spoke by phone to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. According to Trump, Hernández told him that the use of hydroxychloroquine has had “incredible results” in Honduras as a treatment for patients with COVID-19. This conversation took place after Trump had already faced widespread criticism in the United States for promoting the use of the drug as a treatment for coronavirus, despite a lack of medical and scientific evidence to support its use for this purpose, or information regarding its potential side effects.}
And a large sub section of Brazil. There’s a Private Health system called Prevent Senior, they take care of around 500,000 senior citizens. They are using my approach and there are other hospitals have seen a drastic drop off in mortality rate.
DB: What date did they start using your protocol in Brazil?
Dr Z (thoughtfully) Prevention Senior somewhere at the end of March, beginning of April, then there were other hospitals…
{Diagram shows: looks like intensive bed requests (1.12.29 in) and/or deaths.}
DB: It really starts going down around March 6 (just below the # in #Zeigler) and for some time not it’s really been almost non-existent, the death rate which is pretty impressive – especially in America where we’re not using it and we’re watching it flying in certain states.
Other countries? A Turkey is on board, Iran is on board. There is a city in the Ukraine I’m actually leading the task force. They’re actually using prophylactic support and having tremendous success. I wrote to the Ministry of Health in Israel {screen shows letter}
Italy came on board. Italy had the worst death rate in the world, and when they started using HCQ – I actually gave an interview to an Italian media outlet (probably the biggest one in the country) and three days later there was an announcement that they were starting to use HCQ then if you look at the graph then 3 days after that death rates started to drop. (1.14m 0s), Correlation…I didn’t need that, I saw my own patients and they stopped dying.
I made a video and sent it to Trump. I felt like a front line soldier who had made an important discovery and had to give it to my five star general, so he could win the war with it. The next day Mike Meadows (Trump’s Chief of Staff) called me. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him… a few days later mayor Guiliani called me and we did a podcast together and that went viral. Then other news outlets started contacting me – physicians, hospital assistants, I gave them all the information. The more I saw it being used the more I saw tremendous success with it. I’m not taking any credit for this myself, I believe it was a gift from God. It’s about relieving the suffering, it’s so unnecessary. People are not dying from Covid-19, they’re dying from politics. Stupidity, death by stupidity. [Gives an example) If New York was being carpet bombed, would it make sense for Dr Fauci to say we need to do a study to see what kind of bullets work the best- it may take four months, but we have to do a study, because only clinical data like that matters – or would it make sense to use any bullets that were available…and in parallel, do the studies, and if we find something better then transition to that – but why would we not use the best available treatment in the short term.
Why are we allowing the mass – (looks away, hesitates – )genocide of hundreds of thousands of people?
DB I agree. Did you have anything to do with Donald Trump taking HCQ when he …
Dr Z. I can’t tell you the motivation of someone else, but I can tell you the facts. I sent the letter to the president, which is a matter of public record, and the letter – it was mid-April – outlined my data at the time and my recommendations for treatment and for prophylaxis. For prophylaxis I wrote HCQ and zinc. During that news conference he says
“I got a letter from a doctor the other day, from Westchester, new York, around the area, he did not want anything. He just said ‘Sit I have hundreds of patients and I give them hydroxychloroquine, I give them the z-pack, with is azithromycin, and I give them zinc, and out of the hundreds of patients, many patients, more than 300, I haven’t lost one’ “, Trump said, “He said: ‘Please keep pressing that, Sir.'”
(Quoted in the Times of Israel)
DB: And now you have a study hot of the press, just came out. What is that study about, how is it different from what we have been watching in your previous work.
Dr Z. Well actually that study is reporting on my work.
{Screen shows draft of study:
COVID-19 outpatients: early risk-stratified treatment with zinc plus low-dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin: a retrospective case series study
Roland Derwand 1 , Martin Scholz 2 , Vladimir Zelenko 3
Abstract.
The aim of this study was to describe the outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the outpatient setting after early treatment with zinc, low-dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (triple therapy) dependent on risk stratification.}
I was with my two colleagues Dr Derward and Dr Scholz…we really put thousands of hours into this. What the study shows…well it’s a subset of my patients. We only chose patients with a proven diagnosis by lab testing. Because the medical community would not accept clinical diagnosis “the patient had the symptoms of Covid-19” would not be accepted.
It’s a foundational study – it’s the first study in the outpatient setting showing that by risk-stratifying patients and using a three grid regimen, a reduction in hospitalization by 84%. My survival rate of my patients was 99.7.
DB: Wow – and those were your high risk patients.
Dr Z. Actually that was all comers. When you go to a doctor, part of the treatment is to know when not to treat. A good surgeon knows when not to cut, also. Sometimes the most appropriate approach is to do nothing….the patients I didn’t give the medication to had a hundred percent survival. For the patients I did treat, we had a statistically significant difference.
DB: The patients you treated, did any of them have the heart problems we’ve heard about, did you have to back off the treatment
Dr Z. All the hearts kept beating, I had no complications. I actually asked the leading electrophysiologist… cardiologist..(Indistinct). Cardiologists round the country – there’s about 3000 of them, they asked each other – if any of them had ever seen complications using HCQ and zinc. The answer was No. The caveat, in the outpatient setting. They did see problems in the ICU setting. But then it’s hard to know why because 30% of Covid-19 patients in ICU develop heart damage, from Covid-19. So it’s difficult to know. But in the outpatient setting, which is the world I was in, there was zero known complications.
Screen:
“No patient experienced any known severe adverse events that were considered drug-related during treatment or follow-up.”
Listen this drug has been around for 65 years and has been used for multiple conditions. Even the people who were fearmongering and saying look it could kill you were saying OK if you have lupus it’s ok to take it. The hypocrisy was difficult to tolerate.
DB: Let me ask you – I really appreciate your time, I know you’re very busy – how many times have you been asked by mainstream news agencies – CNN, Fox, to discuss … are you doing a lot of interviews on this?
Dr Z: CNN never contacted me. I think I’m going to be on Fox very soon. But what you call the mainstream media has not reached out to me.
DB: That seems incredible to me given that you seem to be sitting in the epicentre not only of the United States but the world, and having incredible results. I don’t understand how reporters and news agencies aren’t at least curious and asking you some questions. How do you think history is going to look back at the events of this pandemic…in relation to HCQ, when we have more of a bird’s eye view of what took place. Who should worry about how they will go down in history?
Dr Z: My personal opinions: anyone who got in the way of access to cure, patients having access to medication, committed crimes against humanity. And are guilty of mass murder.
DB: That’s…as powerful a statement as could be made. Dr Zelenco I want to thank you for your courage, I want to thank you for your diligence, I think you represent what we hope that every doctor has, a curiosity and a desire to do what is necessary to save you patients. Your having a better success rate than alomst anyone else in this country, certainly in many places round the world following you are seeing incredible gains; here at the high wire we have continued this story, we’;; continue to watch the story – I believe you are correct, that people are being needlessly murdered, by being denied the only treatment that has shown success in multiple regions of the world, in multiple different scenarios. Keep up the good work and we look forward to tracking your future work and I hope we can have you on the high wire again soon. Thank you very much
Dr Z: Thank you and God bless you.
DB: God bless.