On March 21, 2020, Zelenko posted a video to
YouTube and
Facebook addressed to U.S. president
Donald Trump, in which he claimed to have successfully tested an experimental treatment for
COVID-19 on hundreds of patients with coronavirus-like symptoms. and posted an open letter to Trump with similar claims two days later. At the time, ongoing research was being conducted by various groups, including the
World Health Organization, to determine the efficacy of using hydroxychloroquine and/or azithromycin to treat COVID-19. In March 2020, Alex Kasprak, a science writer for
Snopes, noted that since Zelenko did not describe his study design nor publish any data, his claims were unverifiable. Zelenko's study compared the outcomes of treated patients to untreated patients in his New York community, with hospitalization rates of 2.8% for treated patients and 15.4% for untreated. Based on the study, Zelenko said that his combination therapy "resulted in five times less hospitalizations and deaths". A higher quality RECOVERY trial (Randomized Evaluation of COVID-19 therapy) comparing a range of possible treatments with usual care in patients hospitalized with Covid-19 found that patients who received hydroxychloroquine "did not have a lower incidence of death at 28 days than those who received usual care." However, since this study used hospitalized patients it may not be directly applicable to Zelenko's focus on early treatment. The
National Institutes of Health ultimately recommended against the use of zinc, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in treatments for COVID-19. The
Satmar Hasidic community in
Kiryas Joel, New York in
Monroe, New York, where Zelenko was a long-time community physician, disputed Zelenko's claims about the potential infection rate in the community, which prompted Zelenko to shut down his office after nearly 20 years. In December 2020,
Twitter suspended Zelenko's account for violating rules against "platform manipulation and spam". In January 2022, Zelenko claimed that children are more likely to die from
COVID-19 vaccines than from COVID-19.
Zelenko's FDA approval claim In April 2020, Zelenko presented a lecture over
Zoom to a group of physicians, in which he alleged that the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had granted approval to a clinical trial he was helping organize. The lecture was attended by conservative commentator
Jerome Corsi, who had been collaborating with Zelenko on a telemedicine Web site. Corsi inadvertently sent an email mentioning that Zelenko had "an FDA approved randomized test of HCQ underway" to federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, instead of Zelenko. Zelinsky, who worked on former special counsel
Robert Mueller's team, had previously questioned Corsi during the
investigation of
Roger Stone. According to Corsi, Zelinsky responded to his email and asked whether he had an attorney, and subsequently informed Corsi's attorney that he had discovered that Zelenko's study was not listed on a government website of FDA-approved clinical trials. Zelinsky requested all communications between Corsi and Zelenko, including text messages, podcast documents, and marketing materials for their website, which Corsi supplied. Zelenko denied any wrongdoing and said that he thought that his study had FDA approval because he had spoken with FDA commissioner
Stephen Hahn. ==Personal life==