How Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s claims for his coronavirus treatment spread from a New York village all the way to President Trump.
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, Dr. Zelenko claimed that 100 percent of them had survived the virus with no hospitalizations and no need for a ventilator.
Kevin Roose, Matthew Rosenberg – The New York Times – April 2, 2020.