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Comment by jbritton | Hacker News Reader

In April, Dr Zelenco stated he had treated some 600 patients with HCQ+Zinc+Zpac with good results. And now more doctors are saying the same. Not a single trial has tested this treatment. This is why people won’t give up hope. From my reading it seems to be Zpac that creates the most heart risk and doxycycline is now sometimes used instead.

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Zelenco has been thoroughly disgraced for ethics violations. His work was so riddled with issues, that it was the subject of ridicule for weeks afterwards by legitimate scientists. It's not worthy of discussion in a good faith discussion on the efficacy of HCQ.

As far as I know this describes Dr Zelenco’s work. Google turns up zero hits for review of this paper. This paper demonstrates efficacy for his treatment. If you have any links discrediting this work I would like to see a link. It is observational. https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1

Dr. Zelenco was working with the FDA to get a trial of his protocol. The FDA director provided some help to get his trial started. The director got criticism for helping. Something about a small trial not being worth his time. I don’t know where this criticism/pressure came from. But this has politics written all over it.

Dr Zelenco made one mistake stating that he had FDA approval to run the trial. The truth is that he had his hospital approval. The district attorney was looking to prosecute him for this mistake. I believe it was a simple mistake. He is not versed in running trials. He was told his trial was approved. He failed to distinguish who made the approval. The DA getting involved is more politics. His trial never got run, probably because of DA pressure. I believe he is a good doctor and has not been discredited. Railroaded by politics more likely. You should be asking why no one wants to test HCQ+Zinc. Why is HCQ condemned without running this most obvious of necessary trials. Why is there no urgency to run a trial on HCQ+Zinc. Why is the media silent on the lack of Zinc in the trials. It might not work, but a trial is more than warranted.

He did one other thing I’m aware of which was to tell his community the current scientific projections of mortality of Covid19. Those projections have proven wrong, and his community blames the messenger.

This is a much better and thorough critique than I could write up:

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2020/04/03/zelenko-smith-aba...

hhw says>"Zelenco[sic] has been thoroughly disgraced for ethics violations. "<

What ethics violations? Please provide a cite that says "Zelenko has been thoroughly disgraced for ethics violations" or even charged with any ethics violations. You're slandering him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/coronavirus-doctor-zel...

Zithromax is an antibiotic. Which is useless against a virus.

And why are doctors giving untested treatments to patients?

>Zithromax is an antibiotic. Which is useless against a virus.

"Azithromycin Induces Anti-Viral Responses in Bronchial Epithelial Cells" has over 220 citations. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20150207/)

To be clear, I think this is a pretty bad "study".

But there are plenty of reasons why antibiotics are given to people with Covid-19 to deal with secondary infections.

> And why are doctors giving untested treatments to patients?

This seems a pretty bad-faith comment. In the early days of COVID-19 there was no "tested" treatment, so doctors use reasoning to try to find something. This is a completely normal thing to do.

Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks is a good way to get people killed.

Doctors are not researchers and they shouldn't be.

It's not a bad-faith comment.

This is all news to the medical profession. They have always and are trained to deal with novel situations by trying treatments based on inferring likely response based in symptoms.

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