An account of a life saved by Dr. Zelenko
He who saves a life, saves the world (Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a)
We say goodbye to Dr. Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko (1973-2022), a great hero who died on June 30 after battling against a rare cancer. As many of us reflect on the life of this great man, I would like to share the story of the role he played in saving my mother’s life.
My mother turns 100 in a little under three weeks, on July 19. In April 2020, when she hadn’t yet turned 98, she acquired COVID-19 while a resident of an assisted living community. Of the 93 residents in that community, 53 became infected and 28 died. Many of the recovered later died, weakened by their encounter with the illness. My mother was the only one in the community who received early treatment for her bout with COVID-19. She received what we now call “the Zelenko protocol”, a combination of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc.
When she first became infected, I contacted her primary care physician, a very bright and capable colleague. He had only met my mother once, when she first arrived to the area three years before. My mother is very healthy and is on no medication, and in general has little use for doctors. Though I know we are not aligned on some important things, like politics, I asked him to be my mother’s physician because he is an excellent doctor. His response to my request to prescribe “the Zelenko protocol” for her was not unexpected. He told me his own mother asked him for hydroxychloroquine when she caught COVID-19 and he denied her request.
I could have taken over the responsibility for my mother’s care and prescribed the protocol. That’s not wise. If her course worsened, my clinical objectivity would be severely compromised. It was right to keep her care with her capable internist.
Hydroxychloroquine is one of the safest medications on earth, yet my colleague refused to prescribe it for his own mother. Our political differences impacted how we thought about this intervention. Could I get us past our political divide and persuade him of the value of early treatment, specifically early treatment with “the Zelenko protocol”, for COVID-19? I shared with him in a text message some of the scientific literature Dr. Zelenko posted supporting the intervention, but his response was silence. Here was my text:
Here are the links included in the text I sent him:
Chloroquine effective against SARS-CoV in vitro
The French study supporting HCQ use
Zelenko's open letter about his protocol
We are colleagues, and he respects my work. Maybe that is why we reached a compromise that my mother would not get the regimen unless she became symptomatic. She was without symptoms when she tested positive on surveillance testing in the community on April 1, 2020, but by April 10, she was clearly suffering. Unfortunately, her course took a turn for the worse on a Saturday — April 11 to be exact — when her oxygen saturation dropped to 89% (less than 93% is the threshold of concern). I was reluctant to text her doctor directly, but the covering doctor felt no obligation to attend to the agreement I had with her doctor regarding “the Zelenko protocol”. He counseled us that we should take her to the hospital. That was the standard of care back in April 2020: “therapeutic nihilism” until you get sick enough to require oxygen. The executive director of her assisted living community, who was personally attending my mother during her battle with COVID-19, suggested we could enroll her in hospice to secure oxygen availability to keep her comfortable. When the covering doctor didn’t return my second call requesting the hospice admission order, I broke protocol and texted her doctor directly to request the order. He responded quickly and, in addition to taking care of the hospice paperwork, he spontaneously offered “the Zelenko protocol” for both my mother and for me so that I could feel protected when attending to her. I remain deeply grateful.
Did the links to the articles I texted him supporting the protocol have any persuasive value? Probably not. I believe my mother is the only patient who received early hydroxychloroquine treatment from him, though I know he now freely writes Paxlovid prescriptions for someone in my mother’s situation, and probably doesn’t grasp the irony — early treatment with drugs that can slow the replication of the virus is a worthwhile strategy, even before Paxlovid became available.
It is impossible to state with certainty that “the Zelenko protocol” played a role in my mother’s recovery, but after her first three doses (1.5 days) her oxygen saturation went from 89 to 98, and her appetite returned. She made steady recovery after that and thus far has had no complications and no evidence of Long COVID.
Thank you, Dr. Zelenko. Rest in peace.
Here is a very informative tribute: