By Art Moore
When Upstate New York physician Dr. Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko drew the attention of President Trump back in the spring of 2020 with a simple protocol of cheap, proven, widely available drugs for COVID-19 that included hydroxychloroquine, he had successfully treated more more than 350 patients, with only one needing hospitalization.
Nearly two years later, amid continued government and media suppression of early treatments, Zelenko told WND in a video interview that he and his team have administered what is now know as the Zelenko Protocol to more than 7,000 COVID patients, with only three deaths.
Moreover, his cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, the popular antibiotic azithromycin and zinc sulfate – along with other combinations of drugs, such as ivermectin – has been adopted by more than 1,000 physicians around the world, along with America’s Frontline Doctors.
Among them are Dr. George Fareed, a former professor of virology at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Brian Tyson. Since April 2020, they collectively have treated more than 7,000 COVID-19 patients in California’s Imperial Valley, with only a few deaths. And no patient died who was treated within the first seven days.
Zelenko has explained that the key virus killer is zinc, which has a known antiviral effect, and it’s drugs like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and quercetin that “open the door to the cell and let the zinc in.”
Since the spring of 2020, he also has been using blood thinners, steroids, monoclonal antibodies and other treatments, but he said he has never changed his messaging since making his appeal to President Trump.
And now he has developed an over-the-counter formulation to treat COVID-19 called Z-Stack that contains zinc, quercetin, vitamin D and vitamin C.
The objective, he said, always has been to prevent a COVID-19 infection from progressing to the catastrophic lung injury called acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, which requires hospitalization and often a ventilator. He found early on that more than 80% of the people with COVID who were put on a respirator were dying. His protocols don’t treat ARDS, but they can keep people from ever developing it.
His approach has been to identify high-risk COVID patients, start treatment immediately with an antiviral and anti-inflammatory combination and tailor the treatment to each patient.
In the video interview with WND, Zelenko tells the story of how he appealed to President Trump in a video and 16 hours later received a phone call from Mark Meadows, who was preparing to become the White House chief of staff.
“You can’t make this stuff up. I wouldn’t believe it, but it happened to me,” he said.
Zelenko then did a podcast interview with Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, that went viral.
“And my life has never been the same since,” he said.
Zelenko since has published a peer-reviewed paper of his data showing an 84% reduction in hospitalization of high-risk patients with his out-patient treatment. Teaming with Prof. Martin Scholz of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany and Dr. Roland Derwand of Munich, Germany, the paper was published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
In the early spring of 2020, in contrast to his current stance, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci was amenable to treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine before it became known as “the Trump drug.”
Fauci was asked in a March 2020 interview with Philadelphia talk-host Chris Stigall whether or not he would prescribe hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.
“Yeah, of course, particularly if people have no other option. You want to give them hope,” said Fauci, the director the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “In fact, for physicians in this country, these drugs are approved drugs for other reasons. They’re anti-malaria drugs and they’re drugs against certain autoimmune diseases, like lupus.”
WND asked Zelenko what he thinks has happened in the meantime.
“Well, in the meantime 850,000 Americans are dead, and we could have prevented probably 730,000 of them from even going to the hospital and ended this pandemic globally,” he replied, alluding to the finding of his paper. “That’s what happened.”
Eventually, Fauci was regularly contradicting the president regarding hydroxychloroquine. And the FDA, in June 2020, removed emergency use authorization for the distribution of hydroxychloroquine from Strategic National Stockpile, based on “new information.” But the decision largely relied on a study published by The Lancet that was embarrassingly retracted by its authors because of faulty data, as WND reported at the time. Later that year, Risch, Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Peter McCullough testified to the U.S. Senate that hydroxychloroquine was being misrepresented in studies and used as a political weapon.
Zelenko pointed to a published paper posted on the National Institutes of Health website in 2005 showing the antiviral properties of chloroquine against SARS is on the level of a vaccine. Hydroxychloroquine is a less toxic analogue of chloroquine. An October 2020 paper posted on the NIH website that reviewed published studies found hydroxychloroquine “is effective, and consistently so when provided early, for COVID-19.” A real-time analysis, which to date has assessed 283 peer-reviewed studies, has come to the same conclusion.
“But the NIH today recommends not treating COVID unless you’re in the hospital with lung damage,” Zelenko said. “Really?”
See the video interview with WND:
A ‘foot and a half in the grave’
A once-irreligious Jew who was born in Kiev, Ukraine, Zelenko became an observant member of the 30,000-strong Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel in Monroe, New York, in the Hudson Valley, about 50 miles north of New York City.
In 2018, Zelenko was diagnosed with pulmonary artery sarcoma, which has a 100% mortality rate. He had open heart surgery and lost his right lung then had very difficult chemotherapy treatment. Since 2020, he’s had another surgery and more chemotherapy.
He noted there are only about 10 cases in the world a year of that disease, and they all end with an autopsy.
Zelenko believes that after having a “foot and a half in the grave,” God spared him for a purpose.
In a March 2020 interview with WND, he summed it up: “My purpose in life has really become to try to relieve pain and suffering. Not to think about myself.”
But Zelenko didn’t stop. He kept researching and working – and discovered a way to help people with an over-the-counter solution he calls Z-Stack.
“Z-Stack was a gift from God in response to tyranny,” says Zelenko. “The ghoul Cuomo, who killed 20,000 nursing home residents in the state of New York, blocked access for my patients to hydroxychloroquine. He took away my ability to deliver zinc inside the cells … to inhibit viral replication. So I was forced to innovate. … I learned about quercetin, which is available over the counter. I realized, ‘Oh my God, I just found the cure, not for COVID, but for tyranny.’
“So, Z-Stack was in response to oppression. It was in response to government overreach and getting in the middle of the sacred relationship between the doctor and the patient.
Z-Stack contains Dr. Zelenko’s special formulation of zinc, quercetin, vitamin D and vitamin C, is GMP-certified, and is proudly made in the USA.
