Anti-Vaccine Movement · COVID Misinformation

Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko: The Country Doctor With Friends in High Places

The White House chief of staff called him. The FDA commissioner answered his texts. Fox News hosts sold his “cure” to millions. In the end he had a pill cocktail, a supplement line and a stack of conspiracy theories, but never the evidence.

A simple country doctor

Before March 2020, Vladimir Zelenko was a local figure. He was born in Kyiv and raised in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. As an adult he became an Orthodox Jew, a baal teshuva, and wrote a 2019 memoir about it called Metamorphosis. For almost two decades he worked as a family doctor in Monroe, New York, looking after families from Kiryas Joel, a crowded and largely poor Hasidic village about an hour north of Manhattan.

He was also seriously ill. In 2018 he was diagnosed with a rare sarcoma that cost him a lung. He later had open-heart surgery and chemotherapy. He kept practising, and he said in his foundation's video that the cancer diagnosis spurred him to act.

March 2020: a video for the President

• 21 March 2020. Zelenko posts a YouTube video claiming he has treated hundreds of patients with COVID-like symptoms with his three-drug combination, and sends it toward Donald Trump. He later said he saw himself as “a commander in the battlefield” who needed “to speak to the five-star general.”
• 23 March 2020. An open letter to the President claims success with a five-day course of the protocol. Snopes notes there is no study design and no published data, so the claims cannot be checked.
• 22 March onward. The day after the video goes up, Mark Meadows, then Trump's incoming chief of staff, contacts Zelenko and asks for his patient data.
• Late March – April 2020. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn phones him. Two days later, according to texts obtained by Vanity Fair, Zelenko asks Hahn for help launching a trial of about 750 outpatients at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York.
• 26 April 2020. Hahn is copied on an email to Zelenko, alongside Meadows and Giuliani, from Jerome Corsi, the conspiracy theorist investigated in the Mueller probe.

No country doctor gets that kind of access by accident. Zelenko's message arrived just as President Trump was promoting hydroxychloroquine from the White House podium as a “game changer.” Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, was promoting the same drugs. Zelenko gave a political argument a clinician's face.

The email that went to the wrong Zelenko

His political connections also brought him the wrong kind of attention. In April 2020, Zelenko gave a Zoom talk to physicians and said the FDA had approved a clinical trial he was helping organize. Corsi was listening. He then emailed someone he thought was Zelenko, writing that the doctor had “an FDA approved randomized test of HCQ underway.” The email actually went to Aaron Zelinsky, a federal prosecutor who had worked on Robert Mueller's team.

Zelinsky asked whether Corsi had a lawyer. He told the lawyer that the study did not appear on the government's registry of FDA-approved trials, and he asked for the Corsi–Zelenko correspondence, which Corsi handed over. The Washington Post, AP, Business Insider and the New York Times all covered the scrutiny. Zelenko denied wrongdoing. He said he believed the study was approved because he had talked to Commissioner Hahn, and he explained:

That is an unusual admission from a man whose claims were influencing national drug policy.

The megaphone

In late March 2020 Sean Hannity interviewed Zelenko on his radio show, saying he was “just blown away by all this.” That evening, on his Fox News TV programme, Hannity held up and read from a letter Zelenko had sent to Mark Meadows during an interview with Vice-President Mike Pence. On 27 March, Rudy Giuliani raised Zelenko's work on Laura Ingraham's Fox show. Over the next week Zelenko made the rounds of conservative media, including podcasts hosted by Steve Bannon and Giuliani.

The New York Times reported that a Media Matters count found Fox had promoted hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine as a coronavirus cure more than 100 times in a single three-day period. Months later, after randomized trials had come back negative, Ingraham was still citing Zelenko's paper on air.

As mainstream outlets moved on, he found newer platforms. IMDb's cast list for The Stew Peters Show, a programme the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a central hub for antisemitic and conspiratorial content, credits “Dr. Zev Zelenko” with four episodes. YouTube removed his original video for violating its community guidelines.

The community that pushed back

The people who knew him best were among the first to object. In March 2020, institutions in Kiryas Joel signed an open letter disputing his YouTube predictions that about 90% of the village would be infected. Local leaders said the infection rate matched the rest of Orange County, and that his claims had led to the community being singled out and discriminated against.

Zelenko responded with a video accusing named local figures, including the town administrator, of orchestrating investigations against him and of responsibility for deaths. In May 2020 he announced he was leaving the practice he had run for nearly 20 years.

What the study showed, and what it didn't

In July 2020, a month after the FDA withdrew its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine, Zelenko co-authored a paper with Roland Derwand and Martin Scholz. It appeared in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents later that year. The paper compared 141 outpatients he had treated with “independent public reference data from 377 confirmed COVID-19 patients in the same community.” It reported hospitalization rates of 2.8% for the treated patients and 15.4% for the comparison group.

The randomized trials were negative. The large UK RECOVERY trial found hydroxychloroquine did not reduce 28-day mortality in hospitalized patients. Supporters argued that RECOVERY did not test early outpatient treatment, but in the end the U.S. National Institutes of Health recommended against using hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc to treat COVID-19. The FDA continued to warn against hydroxychloroquine outside hospital because of heart-rhythm risks. In January 2022 it repeated that the drug had not been shown to be safe or effective against COVID-19.

From “cure” to anti-vaccine crusade

Once the vaccines arrived, Zelenko turned against them.

6 January 2021: the nurses' "special guest"

On the morning of 6 January 2021, Zelenko was billed as the "special guest" at a 10:30 a.m. press conference outside the Supreme Court, held by Global Frontline Nurses after their 9 a.m. summit. The nurses' speakers that day included two Ontario nurses, Kristen Nagle of London and Sarah Choujounian of Toronto, who later lost their jobs and their right to practise. Simone Gold of America's Frontline Doctors, whose summit had used the same Supreme Court steps in July 2020, entered the Capitol that afternoon.

The full story of the nurses, the doctors and the chiropractor who were in Washington that day is on our page Scrubs at the Capitol: The Health Professionals of January 6. The Canadian discipline cases are covered in Global Frontline Nurses and the CNO cases, and Gold's group in America's Frontline Doctors: Where the White Coats Went.

The pattern is familiar from ivermectin. First comes a cheap generic drug that is supposedly being suppressed. Then come conspiracy theories about who is doing the suppressing. Then a branded product appears for the followers to buy.

Why a country doctor had friends in high places

“I'm a simple country doctor, you know,” Zelenko told the New York Times in April 2020. “I don't have connections.” Within days he had them. Four things explain it.

1. Timing. President Trump began promoting hydroxychloroquine on 19 March 2020, after Didier Raoult's small French study. Zelenko's video appeared two days later and gave the White House an American doctor saying it worked.
2. The story. A modest local doctor with a cheap generic drug, ignored by the experts, suited the political moment perfectly.
3. The credential. Politicians and broadcasters needed a practising physician to make the case. Zelenko lent his licence to their argument, and in return he got access.
4. A movement to join. By late 2020 an organised “early treatment” network had formed, complete with a journal paper, advocacy groups and media platforms, and it adopted him.

His network: the December 2020 paper

The clearest map of Zelenko's circle is a single paper. In December 2020 he was one of 57 co-authors of “Multifaceted highly targeted sequential multidrug treatment of early ambulatory high-risk SARS-CoV-2 infection,” led by Peter McCullough and published in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine, a journal McCullough edited. Several of his co-authors went on to prominent roles in the anti-vaccine movement:

Martin Scholz, co-author of Zelenko's own case series, also signed the paper. Two years later, McCullough was listed beside Zelenko again, this time in a fight with Twitter.

Children's Health Defense and the Kennedy orbit

• Kennedy's book. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s The Real Anthony Fauci (November 2021) is built around the claim that Fauci sabotaged hydroxychloroquine. The book praises Zelenko, crediting him with reproducing Raoult's “startling successes.”
• The Twitter suit. On 12 May 2022, a lawyer for Robert Malone, Peter McCullough and Brian Tyson wrote to Twitter demanding that five suspended accounts be reinstated: theirs, Zelenko's and George Fareed's. The three doctors sued Twitter in San Francisco on 27 June 2022. At least one legal-news report also lists Zelenko and Fareed as plaintiffs. Children's Health Defense hosted the complaint on its own website.
• The memorial. After his death, CHD's The Defender published “In Memory of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko — A Moral, Outspoken Truth Warrior,” by Vera Sharav, Meryl Nass and Josh Mitteldorf. Nass's Maine medical licence had been suspended in 2022 over her COVID treatment and public statements.

QuackeryWatch found no record of Zelenko appearing on a stage or a CHD.TV broadcast with Kennedy himself. His own platforms were Steve Bannon, Stew Peters, Brighteon and the right-wing podcast circuit. But by the time he died, CHD was publishing his eulogy and hosting his legal fight, and Kennedy's best-seller had written him into its story of a suppressed cure.

Home ground: Orange and Rockland counties

Zelenko's two clinics were in the two New York counties where, in 2019 and 2021, low vaccination rates in Orthodox enclaves made national news. At the time of his March 2020 letter, he said about 350 of the roughly 500 patients he had treated lived in Kiryas Joel and the other 150 in the Monsey area.

A community that used to vaccinate. Before COVID, Kiryas Joel had a good record on childhood vaccines. In late 2018, as measles spread through Orthodox neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and Rockland, the Forward reported that Kiryas Joel had a 93% vaccination rate and no measles cases so far. It credited the village's long-serving pediatrician, Dr. Alan Werzberger. In 2019 a local health coalition, working with the Orange County health department, distributed a pro-vaccine booklet to Kiryas Joel families. Zelenko mainly treated adults, and QuackeryWatch found no record of him speaking about childhood vaccines before the COVID shots arrived.

Measles came first. The year before COVID, Rockland County had the longest measles outbreak in the U.S. since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. It began on 1 October 2018 with unvaccinated travellers and ended on 25 September 2019 after 312 confirmed cases, most of them in Orthodox and Hasidic neighbourhoods and more than 80% in people aged 19 or younger. Orange County, home to Kiryas Joel, had 57 cases. County health workers gave about 29,500 doses of MMR vaccine, and New York repealed religious exemptions from school vaccination in June 2019.

Then COVID vaccination lagged. On 25 March 2021, Orange County had the lowest vaccination rate in the Hudson Valley at 22.1% of its total population, with Rockland at 27.1%. On 7 June 2021, Governor Cuomo listed the ZIP codes with the lowest vaccination rates in the state:

Deaths. Neither county publishes deaths for Kiryas Joel or Monsey separately. At county level, the cumulative COVID-19 death rates (crude, per 100,000 residents, from New York Times county data and 2020 census populations) were:

These crude rates are lower than the state average because both counties are unusually young, and COVID killed mainly the elderly. Without age-adjusted, community-level figures, the data can't say whether Zelenko's patients did better or worse than their neighbours, which is exactly the question his study claimed to answer.

Was he ever sued or disciplined?

As far as the public record shows, no. QuackeryWatch found:

• No New York disciplinary action. There is no reported action against him by the State Board for Professional Medical Conduct, and no news reports of charges. In May 2020, Zelenko himself said Kiryas Joel's leaders had orchestrated multiple investigations against him, but he didn't say who was investigating, and no outcome was ever made public. The Office of Professional Medical Conduct doesn't publish investigations that end without charges.
• No criminal charges. Federal prosecutors examined his correspondence with Jerome Corsi in 2020 over the claimed FDA-approved trial. Nothing came of it publicly.
• No malpractice judgment found in news coverage or published case law.
• He was on the suing side once: his suspended Twitter account was one of five named in the 2022 Malone/McCullough/Tyson demand and lawsuit (see “Children's Health Defense and the Kennedy orbit”).

That pattern is familiar from the ivermectin prescribers: regulators moved slowly against doctors spreading COVID misinformation, and Zelenko died before any process would have reached him. He wasn't vindicated. The question was simply never decided.

The foundation and “The Zelenko Report”

Shortly before he died, Zelenko launched the Zelenko Freedom Foundation (Z Freedom Foundation), now registered in Boca Raton, Florida (EIN 88-3021092). Twitter suspended its account the day after his death. Its co-chairs were broadcaster Ann Vandersteel (host of Steel Truth) and Kevin Jenkins. In August 2022 Vandersteel launched The Zelenko Report, a weekday show on Mike Adams's Brighteon.TV. Its guests included Li-Meng Yan, and its topics ranged from vaccine mandates to the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago.

The brand is active again. As of 8 November 2026 the foundation's Telegram channel had about 11,300 subscribers and was promoting a new “Episode 1” of The Zelenko Report, featuring Robert Malone's predictions for the 2026 midterms and David Martin's “state-level plan.” Z-Stack is still being sold, with influencer discount codes. Zelenko is gone, but his name still raises money and mobilises political campaigns. In March 2023 the foundation held a “Zelenko Freedom Gala” at Trump Doral Miami, with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk as keynote speaker. The friends in high places outlived him.

What he wrote

Zelenko's published medical record is short: two papers, both from 2020, and nothing indexed before the pandemic.

• Derwand, Scholz & Zelenko, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, published online 26 October 2020. This is the 141-patient case series discussed above. The press release announcing it claimed an “84%” reduction in hospitalizations and a “5-fold reduction in death.”
• McCullough et al., Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine, 30 December 2020. Zelenko was the last of 57 co-authors. Here he gave his affiliation as “Affiliate Physician, Columbia University Irving Medical Center,” a title that appears nowhere else in his public biography.

He also wrote or co-wrote three books:

• Metamorphosis (self-published in 2018, then reissued in hardcover by Israel Bookshop Publications): a memoir of his journey from secular youth to Chabad Judaism, written before COVID.
• Essence to Essence (2019), with his son Levi Yitzchok: a book on Kabbalah and Hasidic thought.
• ZELENKO: How to Decapitate the Serpent (November 2022, published after his death): written with Brent Hamachek of Human Events, co-author of Charlie Kirk's 2016 book Time for a Turning Point, from more than 60 hours of interviews. Its promotional copy sends readers to buy Z-Stack.

QuackeryWatch could not find a single independent review of any of the three books. The “reviews” are interviews with the co-author on sympathetic podcasts, such as Informed Dissent, hosted by anti-mandate physicians Jeff Barke and Mark McDonald, and a handful of reader ratings. The books were written for believers, and only believers reviewed them. The Wellness Company's 2022 anthology The Next Wave is Brave, which includes a chapter by Peter McCullough, is dedicated to him.

The pandemic he was talking through

Zelenko's career as a national figure lasted about 27 months. Over the same period the United States recorded more than one million COVID-19 deaths: 1,007,412 by the day he died, according to the Our World in Data compilation of official counts. The two charts below share one timeline. The top chart shows daily deaths (seven-day average) and the bottom chart shows the share of Americans fully vaccinated. The numbered markers show where Zelenko was and what he was saying at each point.

The chart shows what happened while he argued that a cheap pill cocktail made the pandemic manageable: the deadliest winter came in 2020–21, before most people could get a vaccine. As vaccination climbed past half the population, he was telling audiences the shots were the danger. Vaccination never got much past two-thirds of the population, and the Delta and Omicron waves of late 2021 and early 2022 still killed thousands a day.

The cancer

Vladimir Zelenko died on 30 June 2022, aged 48. Supporters' obituaries give the cause as sarcoma of the pulmonary artery. The Times Herald-Record noted that he had announced a terminal cancer diagnosis back in 2018. He left a wife and eight children. His death was a loss to them, and nobody should be glad of it.

Two facts about his illness matter, though, because the movement he helped build has a habit of rewriting medical histories:

That is not a gotcha. Seeking real treatment for a deadly cancer was the right thing to do, and anyone in his position should do the same. The point is that the people who believed his protocol and refused vaccination on his word deserved the same quality of evidence that he relied on for himself.

The legend after the man

After his death, admirers described him as a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. They said he had overseen about 7,500 patients with only three deaths and that his protocol had “saved millions of lives.”

• The patient numbers come from Zelenko and his supporters. No independent audit or controlled study has confirmed them.
• The “Nobel nomination” was a group nomination of COVID doctors by a supporter. Thousands of people are eligible to nominate, the Nobel Committee keeps nominations secret for 50 years, and a nomination is not an honour bestowed by anyone.
• The protocol is still not recommended by any major public-health authority.

His Z Freedom Foundation and Zelenko Labs both said they would carry on after his death. The protocol, the supplement and the vaccine fears are still circulating.

Sources

1. Kevin Roose & Matthew Rosenberg, “Touting Virus Cure, ‘Simple Country Doctor’ Becomes a Right-Wing Star,” New York Times, 2 April 2020.
2. Vanity Fair, May 2020: reporting on Zelenko–Hahn text messages, the St. Francis Hospital trial proposal and Meadows's request for patient data.
3. Sharon LaFraniere & Kevin Roose, “Doctor Who Promoted Malarial Drug Draws Scrutiny of Federal Prosecutors,” New York Times, 5 May 2020; also Washington Post (30 April 2020), AP (1 May 2020), Business Insider (1 May 2020).
4. Alex Kasprak, Snopes fact checks on Zelenko's treatment claims, 25 and 30 March 2020.
5. Ari Feldman, “Why Dr. Vladimir Zelenko staked his reputation on hydroxychloroquine,” The Forward, 22 May 2020.
6. JTA, “Orthodox doctor who promoted coronavirus cocktail is leaving the community where he tested his treatment,” 20 May 2020; Mid-Hudson News on Kiryas Joel officials' statement, March 2020.
7. R. Derwand, M. Scholz & V. Zelenko, “COVID-19 outpatients: early risk-stratified treatment with zinc plus low-dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin: a retrospective case series study,” International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, 2020.
8. Mediaite, “Hannity touts unverified coronavirus treatment from NY family doctor,” 23–24 March 2020; Axios, “DOJ probes doctor whose hydroxychloroquine claims were touted by Sean Hannity,” 1 May 2020 (corrected); Honolulu Star-Advertiser (NYT service), on his podcast appearances.
9. Matt Gertz, “Amid coronavirus surge, Ingraham lashes out at media over hydroxychloroquine,” Media Matters, 2 December 2020.
10. Molly Boigon, “Hasidic doctor spouts conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine sentiment in video,” The Forward, 11 January 2021.
11. Science Feedback, review of Z-Stack claims, 18 January 2022; Australian Associated Press Fact Check, 20 January 2022.
12. NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines (chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine; zinc); FDA statements on hydroxychloroquine (2020, January 2022).
13. P.A. McCullough et al. (incl. V. Zelenko), Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine 21(4):517–530, 30 December 2020, doi:10.31083/j.rcm.2020.04.264; AAPS press release, PR Newswire, 31 December 2020.
14. R.F. Kennedy Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci (Skyhorse, 2021), chapter 1.
15. Malone, McCullough and Tyson v. Twitter: The New American, 8 July 2022; Desert Review, June 2022; Legal Newsline, 2022; CHD Defender, June 2022.
16. V. Sharav, M. Nass & J. Mitteldorf, “In Memory of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko,” The Defender (Children's Health Defense), July 2022.
17. Kiryas Joel vaccination: The Forward, “Lakewood, Orthodox Jews, vaccines and the measles outbreak,” late 2018; Frieda Vizel, “I found this pro-vaccine Hasidic book,” 3 April 2019.
18. Books: Israel Bookshop Publications listing for Metamorphosis (ISBN 9781600916564); Goodreads listing for ZELENKO: How to Decapitate the Serpent (2022); Informed Dissent podcast, 29 January 2023; Clarity from Chaos podcast, 2023 (Zelenko Freedom Gala, Trump Doral, 11 March 2023); The Next Wave is Brave (The Wellness Company, 2022).
19. Press release, “COVID-19 Outpatients – Early Risk-Stratified Treatment…,” PR Newswire, 29 October 2020.
20. Measles: CNN, ABC7 and Science News, 25 September 2019 (312 Rockland cases); NYS Department of Health honour roll, Rockland County Measles Response Team; Healio, 4 September 2019 (Orange County 57 cases).
21. COVID vaccination: Patch, 25 March 2021 (Hudson Valley county rates); Patch and Daily Voice, 7–8 June 2021, and Office of the Governor, 7 June 2021 (lowest ZIP codes); BoroPark24, June 2021 (community objections to the ZIP-code comparison).
22. County deaths: New York Times COVID-19 county data (github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data); U.S. Census 2020 populations.
23. Zelenko Freedom Foundation: GuideStar profile (EIN 88-3021092); Brighteon.TV/NewsTarget episode reports, August–September 2022; IMDb listing for The Zelenko Report (2022–2023); Telegram channel statistics (telemetr.io), 8 November 2026.
24. Our World in Data, COVID-19 dataset (owid-covid-data.csv), United States series for deaths and people fully vaccinated, retrieved November 2026.
25. Global Frontline Nurses, press-conference poster for 6 January 2021 (in QuackeryWatch files); Vice and National Post coverage of the nurses' summit, January 2021.
26. Open Letter to American Leaders & Citizens from a Community of Holocaust Survivors, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 28 May 2021.
27. Southern Poverty Law Center, profile of Stew Peters; IMDb cast listing for The Stew Peters Show.
28. Clay Risen, “Vladimir Zelenko, 48, Dies; Promoted an Unfounded Covid Treatment,” New York Times, 1 July 2022; Times Herald-Record (Middletown, NY), July 2022; JTA/Jewish News, July 2022.
29. Supporters' accounts of his illness and treatment: World Council for Health memorial, 1 July 2022; The American Spectator, “In Memoriam: Vladimir Zelenko, M.D.”