Dr. Zev Zelenko had both moral and intellectual courage in a society dominated by go-along-to-get-along. Dr. Zelenko was an astute physician, keenly aware of the nuances in disease presentations of his patients. They came to him for treatment of the respiratory disease that would become Covid-19.
Dr. Zelenko’s mind was always active in thinking about the best ways to care for his patients, and in the absence of established methods of treatment, he searched for what other clinicians had been doing for this and similar respiratory infections.In Korea, doctors had been using chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine–in fact, this agent was known to be effective in the SARS-CoV-1 era–so he adopted that. He knew that zinc had been suggested to help in respiratory virus infections. And he found that doctors in Marseille had been using the antibiotic azithromycin in regimens to treat Covid patents.
