Our Obituary for Dr. Zev Zelenko

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By Vera Sharav, Meryl Nass and Josh Mittledorf

Last week, we lost a precious ally, a doctor whose simple commitment
to scientific truth and caring for those in his charge carried him to
extraordinary places in the last years of his life. Four years after
being diagnosed with a rare cancer, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko (“Zev,” as we
knew him) died on June 30, at age 48.

Zev was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1973, when it was part of the
Soviet Union. Both his grandfathers were officers who served with
distinction in the Soviet army against the Nazis. His grandparents
survived the war. But dozens of his extended family members were
slaughtered at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv where some 34,000 Jews were shot during a 48-hour massacre in 1941.

Zev and his family came to the U.S. in 1978 when he was four. He went
to public school in Brooklyn and got a scholarship to medical school at
the State University of New York at Buffalo. For nearly 20 years, he
served as a physician in upstate New York.

He was a family doctor in the orthodox Jewish community of Rockland County. When the COVID-19 pandemic began to hit his patients, COVID-19 was exacting a deadly toll:
21% of patients hospitalized and 88% of patients who were placed on
ventilators died. But there were no treatments to fight the virus in its
early stages, or so we were all told.

Zev was determined to find a way to keep his COVID-19 patients out of
the hospital. He did the homework that every doctor should have done,
but few did. Searching the medical literature, he came upon the
experiences related by Dr. Didier Raoult in France and by physicians in South Korea.

He watched MedCram Lecture 34
by Dr. Roger Seheult about the use of zinc and zinc ionophores. Zinc is
an essential mineral for humans, and a little extra zinc is sometimes
used to lessen the intensity of colds and sore throats. An ionophore is a
chemical that opens the cell wall to allow minerals (ions) to enter.

‘First do no harm’

Zinc is an over-the-counter supplement. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is a
reliable ionophore, and it has a well-established dosing regimen and
safety profile, since millions of healthy people who live in or visit
malaria hotspots take it regularly as a preventive.

HCQ is safe enough to be sold without prescription all over Africa,
in parts of South America and in some European countries as well. Zev
added to the experimental protocol azithromycin, a common,
broad-spectrum antibiotic that prevents the opportunistic bacterial
pneumonia that often follows viral infections of the lungs.

Of the first 50 patients on his experimental protocol, all 50
recovered with symptoms sufficiently mild that they did not need
hospitalization. Zev shared his experience in a letter and video
addressed to physicians, informing them how well early treatment worked
to save lives.

But he was surprised to find that soon, federal agencies were warning
doctors against HCQ, and without precedent, they were restricting
doctors’ freedom to prescribe the drug off-label for COVID-19.

The “Zelenko Protocol” was nevertheless picked up by a few other doctors, and together they published in a medical journal.
With a simple, almost naïve sense of a physician’s duty, Zev wrote to
the president, describing his success treating several hundred patients.

Miraculously, the letter reached President Trump, who claimed on national TV that HCQ might be a “gift from God.”

Suppression of early treatment

But Trump was, at that point, a uniquely divisive figure in American
politics. Most professionals fell on the side of the divide that
believed nothing that came from Trump’s mouth. In those days, in a
credibility contest with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Fauci won hands down. There were millions of Americans conditioned to believe “If Trump says it, it must be false.”

The liberal media disseminated a barrage of lies about the danger of
HCQ, oblivious to decades of medical experience attesting to its safety.
And they pilloried Zev for publicizing a life-saving alternative to its
government-endorsed, patent-protected rival, remdesivir.

As Zev described it, “For better or worse, my life was never again
the same. I went from being an obscure family doctor onto a public stage
overnight. I was thrown into a pool with media sharks and politicians —
the essence of evil itself.”

The New York Times headlined its own obituary with, “Vladimir Zelenko, 48, Dies; Promoted an Unfounded Covid Treatment” and claimed, “A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found no benefit from the treatment, and other studies highlighted a risk of dangerous heart arrhythmias in some patients.”

What the New York Times didn’t report was that 35 of a total 38 studies using HCQ for early COVID-19 treatment showed the drug’s benefit, and overall, early treatment resulted in 72% fewer deaths.

The Times also neglected to mention a massive pharma-funded campaign
to discredit the drug. In a scandal of unbelievable audacity, a huge
study of 100,000 patients on six continents was published in one of the
world’s top medical journals, The Lancet, but two weeks later was
retracted. The study was a fraud from the outset, based on fabricated data that neither its first author from Harvard nor the prestigious Lancet had apparently bothered to fact-check.

The anti-HCQ propaganda campaign corrupted the medical literature
with three multicenter clinical trials that were designed to fail by
causing dangerous arrhythmias. Though HCQ is effective in early stages
of the disease, when the virus is still multiplying, the trials were
limited to hospitalized patients with late-stage COVID-19.

Worse, the dosage was about four times higher than the standard safe dose, deliberately overdosing patients in order to create the illusion that HCQ was dangerous, and to stop doctors from using it for COVID-19.

More than 500 overdosed patients died in those “overdose” trials. We
now know the motivation for this fraudulent and criminal perversion of
medicine. Our government and major pharmaceutical giants were already
committed to fast-track development of a vaccine, and American law
specifies that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could authorize
vaccines for emergency use only if it found that no alternative,
already-licensed treatments were available.

The end of the doctor-patient relationship?

Zev spoke openly about the debasement of medicine, noting that in the
last 50 years, American education has shifted. Instead of teaching
analytical reasoning and problem solving, the education system has been
indoctrinating students to bow to authority. This deference to “experts”
has led to the corruption of medicine and to doctors obeying
counterproductive COVID-19 policies.

Most doctors today are employed by large professional corporations or
hospitals that control the practice of medicine. When government
decrees outlawed the distribution of HCQ, honest doctors who raised
objections lost their jobs, were de-platformed by the media and barred
from publishing in major medical journals. Some lost their licenses.

Zev noted that scientific debate has been throttled, and doctors have
been lured away from regarding their patients’ welfare as their first
and most important motivation; only government-specified treatments are
now permitted.

In fact, as Zev pointed out, medicine has become so corrupted that
doctors won’t offer treatments to their patients that they eagerly
embrace for themselves.

“Many doctors who know that the officially sanctioned treatments are
killing patients, are taking the medicines I prescribe for their own
prophylactic protection,” said Zev.

Uncovering the massive fraud and coverup masterminded by public health agencies

Zev went on to treat 7,500 patients with an extraordinary level of
success (losing only three), and to research the origin as well as the
treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus.

He learned that those who had been involved in the National
Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded bioweapon research that led to
COVID-19 were deceitful enough to ensure that there was an effective
antidote available for their private use. In particular, he mentioned
Ralph Baric, a University of North Carolina (UNC) professor and the top
SARS coronavirus researcher in the U.S.

Zev uncovered a 2010 paper
coauthored by Baric in which zinc was shown to prevent replication of
SARS coronavirus by inhibiting its RNA polymerase. The authors of the
paper noted that zinc also inhibits replication of influenza and respiratory syncytial viruses
or RSV. RSV causes 1,000 deaths per year in U.S. infants. This
knowledge could potentially provide cheap and effective treatments for
these viruses, for which there are currently no effective treatments.

But Baric never made any public statements during the pandemic about
his own findings regarding the effectiveness of zinc for COVID-19.

Baric acknowledged working on gain-of-function (bioweapon) studies, stating he had been given a waiver by the NIH to do so. Controversial experiments that enhance the lethality of deadly pathogens are euphemistically called “gain of function.”

Baric collaborated closely with Shi Zhengli
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including on the paper just cited.
Baric was even involved in the development of remdesivir, which the NIH
guidelines promote as the “standard of care” instead of HCQ.

Remdesivir costs $3,200 per person, is questionably effective, and is
toxic to the liver and kidneys. Until recently, it could be given only
to hospitalized patients. But remdesivir was a profitable side-show —
both Baric at UNC and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had been involved in its development. The
main object was to block HCQ, an inexpensive oral drug that could be
given early to outpatients to prevent progression of illness.

Baric knew about the effectiveness of zinc for COVID-19 and kept his
mouth shut, but there was an even bigger cover-up going on regarding
COVID-19 treatments. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) and NIH had done similar experiments with chloroquine and HCQ,
going back to the first SARS virus scare in 2003. They knew the
chloroquine drugs could kill SARS and MERS (Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome) coronaviruses in tissue culture — yet our public health
agencies never told the public about this.

They also knew about safe dosage; chloroquine worked for SARS at the
same safe doses used for malaria prevention. The CDC knew this in 2005
when it published a paper
titled, “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus
infection and spread.” But the CDC never said a word about it during the
COVID pandemic.

At NIH, Fauci’s NIAID performed a similar but more comprehensive set
of experiments, testing available, repurposed drugs on SARS and MERS
coronaviruses, and published the results in 2014. Here is what they discovered:

“… 66 of the screened drugs were
effective at inhibiting either MERS-CoV or SARS-CoV infection in
vitro and that 27 of these compounds were effective against both
MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV. These data … provide an expedited approach for
supporting off-label use of approved therapeutics.”

Not only did chloroquine and HCQ prevent viral replication, but so
did dozens of other licensed drugs, listed in Table 2 of their paper!
But Fauci and the rest of the NIH and the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services never told the public.

Instead, Fauci did everything he could to prevent evidence of HCQ’s benefit from reaching the public — going so far as to cancel his own tightly controlled study of HCQ after only 20 of the projected 2,000 patients had been enrolled.

‘A conspiracy realist’

Zev continued his research until his death, finally concluding:

“I am not a conspiracy theorist, but a
conspiracy realist. I came to the realization that the success of my
treatment protocol — which saves lives — posed a major financial threat
to an all-powerful group of people whose interests were served by
hospital-centered protocols that increased deaths.”

“Why then,” Zev wondered, “was there a choreographed, orchestrated
media campaign and political campaign to marginalize and vilify these
drugs to scare people and deprive them of hope? Why? Anything that gave
people hope reduced fear …”

For the past year and a half, Zev was an outspoken critic of the mass
mRNA vaccination campaign. He was especially critical about the drive
to vaccinate children against COVID-19, since there is absolutely no
medical justification to vaccine children; they are at practically zero
risk from the disease. He characterized the vaccination policy as “child
sacrifice.”

In Zev’s words from the film Doctors Orders, as recounted by Shabnam Palesa Mohamed:

“And the sociopaths, they have a big thing coming for them. They think they are gods, they think that they’re ruling the world.

“So let the games begin. And I have no
problem falling in battle. This is a hill that we need to die on, die
for. Because, otherwise, our progeny will have nowhere to breathe free.”

In his final video message from his hospital death bed, Zev warned that the World Health Organization was encroaching on the sovereignty of nations.

He urged us:

“Resist their evil agenda and fear
campaigns, lockdown campaigns, isolation campaigns, dehumanizing mask
campaigns. They will keep sending wave after wave of fear until we
resolve to kick out the evil from within. Denounce the false gods of
technology, science, the gods of corrupt government, of money, power,
fame, and return with our hearts to our True Creator.”

Shortly before he died, Zev announced the formation of the Z Freedom Foundation,
dedicated to continuing his critical work. And on June 10, he asked me
(Vera Sharav), as he did many others, to help spread the word about his
forthcoming memoir, titled “Zelenko: How to Decapitate the Serpent.”