How The Media Is Portraying A Physician Who Found Chloroquine To Be Effective

How a ‘simple country doctor’s’ claims of a coronavirus cure made it all the way to Trump and turned him into 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 coronaviruslike 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, Zelenko claimed that 100% 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 Donald 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. 

Zelenko’s treatment arrived at a useful moment for Trump and his media supporters, who have at times appeared more interested in discussing miracle cures than testing delays or ventilator shortages. 

Few people have been as hopeful about hydroxychloroquine as 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. 

Zelenko’s treatment arrived at a useful moment for Trump and his media supporters, who have at times appeared more interested in discussing miracle cures than testing delays or ventilator shortages. Critics have accused Zelenko of getting ahead of scientific research. 

Several small studies, including a controversial French one of 20 coronavirus patients, have found that hydroxychloroquine may be effective against the coronavirus. This week, doctors in China said it had helped to speed the recovery of a small number of patients who were mildly ill from the coronavirus. But other studies have contradicted those findings or have been inconclusive. 

“Anyone who tells you these drugs work, or don’t work, is not basing that view on science,” said David Juurlink, head of the division of clinical pharmacology at the University of Toronto.