Thursday, April 02, 2020
Touting Virus Cure, ‘Simple Country Doctor’ Becomes a Right-Wing Star
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.
“I’m seeing tremendous positive results,” he said in a March 21 video, which was addressed to President Trump and eventually posted to YouTube and Facebook.
What happened next is a modern pandemic parable that illustrates how the coronavirus is colliding with our fragile information ecosystem: a jumble of facts, falsehoods and viral rumors patched together from Twitter threads and shards of online news, amplified by armchair experts and professional partisans and pumped through the warp-speed accelerator of social media.
Dr. Zelenko’s treatment arrived at a useful moment for Mr. Trump and his media supporters, who have at times appeared more interested in discussing miracle cures than testing delays or ventilator shortages.
Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, quickly promoted Dr. Zelenko’s claims on his TV and radio shows. Mark Meadows, the incoming White House chief of staff, called Dr. Zelenko to ask about his treatment plan. And Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, praised him in a podcast interview this week for “thinking of solutions, just like the president.”
Few people have been as hopeful about hydroxychloroquine as Mr. Trump, who has enthusiastically promoted it for weeks as “very effective” and possibly “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine” — even as health experts have cautioned that more research and testing are needed.
That has not deterred Mr. Trump’s supporters, who have vilified public health officials such as Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the most outspoken advocate of emergency virus measures. Instead, some are pinning their hopes on Dr. Zelenko and his unproven treatment plan, which has now been seen by millions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/technology/doctor-zelenko-coronavirus-drugs.html
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.
“I’m seeing tremendous positive results,” he said in a March 21 video, which was addressed to President Trump and eventually posted to YouTube and Facebook.
What happened next is a modern pandemic parable that illustrates how the coronavirus is colliding with our fragile information ecosystem: a jumble of facts, falsehoods and viral rumors patched together from Twitter threads and shards of online news, amplified by armchair experts and professional partisans and pumped through the warp-speed accelerator of social media.
Dr. Zelenko’s treatment arrived at a useful moment for Mr. Trump and his media supporters, who have at times appeared more interested in discussing miracle cures than testing delays or ventilator shortages.
Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, quickly promoted Dr. Zelenko’s claims on his TV and radio shows. Mark Meadows, the incoming White House chief of staff, called Dr. Zelenko to ask about his treatment plan. And Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, praised him in a podcast interview this week for “thinking of solutions, just like the president.”
Few people have been as hopeful about hydroxychloroquine as Mr. Trump, who has enthusiastically promoted it for weeks as “very effective” and possibly “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine” — even as health experts have cautioned that more research and testing are needed.
That has not deterred Mr. Trump’s supporters, who have vilified public health officials such as Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the most outspoken advocate of emergency virus measures. Instead, some are pinning their hopes on Dr. Zelenko and his unproven treatment plan, which has now been seen by millions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/technology/doctor-zelenko-coronavirus-drugs.html
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