How to Stop the Virus And the Quarantines Now

JP Leonard
5 min readApr 21, 2020

Let’s Shut Down the Virus, Not the People

What we can not afford is to waste more precious time. Delay is costing us thousands of deaths a day and ballpark $1 trillion in losses a week! Let’s make up for lost time now.

Ask your doctor to join the project at FieldTrials.Net and help prove this promising therapy, or Sign the Petition for clinical trials. Yes, it’s science-based.

During the last month, physicians in New York and California announced a 100% cure for coronavirus symptoms, with a 5 day treatment of two safe and effective drugs, Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and zinc.[1] If we can repeat their results widely, it could halt the crisis within a matter of days. No virus, no quarantine.

Health authorities have ignored this because the reports by the two doctors haven’t been confirmed by controlled clinical trials. With so much at stake, why hasn’t such a study been done?

In recent surveys, 65% of doctors in the US already say they would prescribe HCQ to their families; 50% worldwide are prescribing it.[2] Zinc is even more innocuous, and does not even require a prescription.

This is an appeal to hospitals to start clinical trials of HCQ+Zinc urgently, and to more doctors and patients to start trying out the regimen now.[3]

Funding for trials could be provided by patients’ health insurance, or by donors who want to stop the economic losses from the shutdown. Patients, quarantine opponents, citizens can request hospitals, clinics, universities or doctors to conduct a clinical study.

Zinc is an antiviral agent that our immune system uses to block viruses from replicating. A long-term side benefit of this therapy will be to focus more attention on immune health, which can help to ward off future pandemics.

HCQ is a traditional malaria drug on the WHO list of essential medicines. It also multiplies the uptake of zinc into the cells.[4] It is reported to have some therapeutic effects on Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2, which may in turn be enhanced by zinc.

This combo of “synthetic quinine” and zinc can also be given preventively[5] to the at-risk group who account for 99% of deaths[6] — elderly, mostly male patients with chronic conditions linked to zinc deficiency — thus protecting them without confining the healthy.

Trial Design

Here I propose a fast-track design for the live treatment situation.

All patients get standard dose Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for the entire study, e.g. 10 days; this is the control variable. High-dose zinc (HDZn) is the test variable.
Off and on refer to active agent or test variable (in this case zinc).

Off, Day 1, baseline measurement before start of trial. Record vital statistics.
On, Day 1, start HCQ and HDZ.
Off, a few days later, e.g. Day 4. Replace HDZ with placebo, HCQ continues.
On, a couple days later, e.g. Day 7 until end of trial, put patient back on HDZ.
End of trial, e.g. Day 10 (hopefully should be recovery)

Daily dosage: some doctors use 200 mg HCQ, others 400 mg. Double loading dose first day. Zinc, 30–50 mg elemental zinc.
Measure symptoms daily on a scale of 1 to 5. The trends will be data for evidence of efficacy.
Measure serum zinc at each of the 4 junctures above, to help confirm the zinc ionophore hypothesis

This is a short version of a trial type that may be termed an off-on-off-on reversal single-subject trial.
“Off-on-off-on reversal” refers to the alternation of active agent with placebo to confirm its efficacy, so you can compare symptoms between on and off periods. Single-subject just means comparing each patient’s own condition between these different times, but there can be any number of patients. Each patient is their own control, which efficiently avoids a lot of complexity.

Patients with heart conditions can take a weaker OTC ionophore instead of HCQ. Participation is with voluntary with patient’s consent. Physicians may choose to give low dose zinc, Vitamin C or D in place of an empty placebo. This may be good for treatment results, but will add noise to the statistics. Of course, the proof of the pudding for all concerned is recovery.

This design may be used for any promising treatment physicians wish to test and share. More details on the design are at FieldTrials.net / Open Science Framework.

In line with the Pareto principle or 80–20 rule, physicians can achieve 80% of the total possible level of proof with less than 20% of the resources it takes for “gold standard” clinical trials (which aren’t even suited to acute conditions). “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Quantitative proof is crucially needed to speed peer-to-peer acceptance of the therapy. Although quite a few doctors have been interviewed by major news media about their successes with this, zinc tends to be ignored. Surveys show that around 60% of doctors are using HCQ and Zpacks, but less than 20% use zinc, and probably only a fraction of those use high dose zinc.

Physicians and patients don’t need permission to try this treatment and share their results publicly. If trusted physicians can validate their results to the satisfaction of other physicians, they can get the ball rolling.

The Four Ways Zinc (Zn2+) Inhibits Viral Replication in vitro, in “The Role of Zinc in Antiviral Immunity” https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/10/4/696/5476413

[*] See Bill Sardi for this and other good info about zinc+HCQ. (I didn’t include Azithromycin (Zpack) because it would make the trial design more cumbersome, is already widely used, and is an antibiotic rather than an antiviral, but subjects could take it as well). All meds being taken should be recorded at the start of the trial, as well as chronic conditions and especially serum zinc level.

[1] Drs. Zelenko and Cardillo. See “Add Zinc: From Game-Changer to Game-Winner against Coronavirus” https://medium.com/@leonardjpmail/think-zinc-9c114fde64bf

[2] 65 Percent of Physicians in New Survey Would Give Anti-Malaria Drugs to Their Own Family to Treat COVID-19 https://news.yahoo.com/65-percent-physicians-survey-anti-142800139.html ; Sermo Reports https://www.sermo.com/press-releases/category/week-of-0413/

[3] Typically, 400 mg of HCQ and 220 mg of zinc sulfate for 5 days.

[4] Add Zinc: From Game-Changer to Game-Winner against Coronavirus https://medium.com/@leonardjpmail/think-zinc-9c114fde64bf

[5] https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_medicine/Marik-Covid-Protocol-Summary.pdf

[6] Add Zinc: From Game-Changer to Game-Winner against Coronavirus https://medium.com/@leonardjpmail/think-zinc-9c114fde64bf

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