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On March 29, 2020, Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney to U.S. President Donald Trump, tweeted about a treatment from family practitioner Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who has claimed to have treated 669 COVID-19 coronavirus patients with a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc: A more detailed explainer of the potential role of anti-malarial drugs like hydroxychloroquine against the COVID-19 coronavirus disease, with or without antibiotics, can be found here. Zelenko’s claims, however, rest solely on taking him at his word: He has published no data, described no study design, and reported no analysis. In an open letter to Trump dated March 23, 2020, and published online in various locations, Zelenko provided his first batch of assertions without providing evidence to support his treatment regime: As has been noted elsewhere, combining hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin can cause serious problems for people with certain heart conditions. Though zinc appears to be an important factor in several immune functions, a potential mechanism for how it might work against viral infections is not well-understood. In an interview with Forward, Zelenko acknowledged that his regimen was new and untested, and that it was too soon to assess its long-term effectiveness. He instead argued that the risks of waiting to verify its efficacy were greater. This is an assertion with which public health officials largely disagree. Regardless, making an assertion in a blog post or in a YouTube interview that neither describes the study design nor provides the actual data used to reach a conclusion about efficacy cannot, in any way, be critically evaluated. As such, this claim is rated Unproven.
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