Freedom Counsel drops today, Election Day. A good day to talk about what happens when a citizen speaks up.
Dr. Ron Elfenbein is a Johns Hopkins-trained emergency physician in Maryland. He was medical director of Drs ERgent Care in Gambrills. In December 2021 he went on Fox News and said the federal government was letting people die.
About four months later, he was charged with federal healthcare fraud.
He sat down with me on Freedom Counsel, along with his best friend, John White — who describes himself as a whistleblower.
The Trump Drug
You may remember the drug. On October 2, 2020, President Trump got COVID and received Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody cocktail. Days later he called it “a cure” and said he wanted every American to get what he got — for free.
Ron says ordinary patients couldn’t get it. The system was, in his words, “cockamamie”: PIN logins, printed forms, faxes sent off in hope that somebody would call back. So his company set up a call center. He says they went from about five infusions a week to 500.
He says they became the largest monoclonal antibody provider in Maryland, and he argues on the whole Eastern Seaboard outside Florida. He says HHS asked him to open a health-equity site at City of Praise Church in Landover, right by FedEx Field — part of the federal KPMG Health Equity Initiative, a roughly $142.7 million program meant to bring those infusions to poor and underserved communities.
John White volunteered at that Landover site. He says a three-month plan with Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Archdiocese of Washington to open infusion sites in D.C. churches was stopped in December 2021 on the day it was finalized — the same day the Archdiocese’s media teams were ready to announce it.
Then came the freeze.
Eleven Weeks
On August 24, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci stood at the White House and said early monoclonal antibody treatment could cut hospitalization or death by 70 to 85 percent, calling it “much-underutilized.” (White House briefing; slides)
Eleven weeks later, on November 10, 2021, HHS issued the termination notice that ended the $142.7 million Health Equity Initiative. Guests and the interview brief put the surrounding calendar this way: the day before, the government bought about $1 billion more of Merck’s antiviral pill; about a week after the termination, a $5.29 billion purchase order for Pfizer’s Paxlovid — which the FDA did not authorize until December 22, the same day the most widely used antibodies were frozen for doctors nationwide.
“Eleven weeks later, they take the whole program down,” Ron told me. “Eleven weeks.”
Ron says that December 22 email from Maryland landed while he still had refrigerators full of drug he wasn’t allowed to use. The stated reason was Omicron. The CDC had estimated Omicron at about 73% of cases; a week later it revised that to about 23%.
“If what they were saying was true, I should have seen treatment failure after treatment failure,” he said. “We saw zero.”
That’s one doctor’s experience, not a clinical trial. But he was the one doing the infusing — and he says he had to cancel infusions for about 250 patients.
“We have a life saving cure available to give you,” he said. “We’re just not allowed to give it to you.”
So he called the media. Fox ran this headline: “Maryland doctor says people are ‘going to die’ after Biden administration uses faulty data to snub antibody treatments.”
“My comment is that the government’s incompetent and they’re killing people,” he told me.
What the Numbers Said — Before the Cutoff
Maryland’s health department tracked what it called “preventable deaths.” By November 2021 it estimated about 956 hospitalizations and 391 preventable deaths avoided — roughly one life for every 52 doses. There is no public count for the period after access was cut off. (Baltimore Sun coverage of the MDH estimate)
An NIH-sponsored, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine (July 2022) found that about one in three hospitalized patients who would have died survived with monoclonal antibodies. (Lancet)
Hospital use of these COVID antibodies was never authorized in the United States, while Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and the World Health Organization approved that use in 2021. That is the guests’ framing of the policy gap — and Ron, as an ER doctor, says it mattered for the patients who never got a shot at the treatment.
Four Months Later
Ron’s Fox appearance was December 29. “Four months later, almost to the day, I get indicted,” he said. Five counts of healthcare fraud, all of it about billing codes.
He believes it was payback. The government says it was fraud. A jury convicted him.
Then something unusual happened. U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar, who presided over the trial, threw the conviction out in an opinion of about 93 pages.
Rod Rosenstein, the former U.S. Attorney for Maryland, told The Baltimore Banner: “Judge Bredar’s opinion is a tour de force… they should be skeptical about prosecuting people for allegedly violating vague federal regulations. Sometimes cases are better handled with civil enforcement.”
That’s not usually what a former top prosecutor says about a fraud case.
The government appealed. On July 17, 2025, the Fourth Circuit reversed the acquittal in United States v. Elfenbein (No. 24-4048). It also upheld Bredar’s conditional order for a new trial. The American Medical Association and MedChi, Maryland’s state medical society, filed amicus briefs on Ron’s side.
“The AMA writes the rules that the government is accusing me of breaking,” Ron said. “So the very writer of the rules said he didn’t break the rules.”
Judge Bredar has since recused. The retrial is set for January 11, 2027.
“Too Good”
John White spent years in pharmaceutical marketing. He says his company once provided marketing services to Pfizer and Merck on matters unrelated to COVID. He argues the monoclonal antibodies Ron used became “too good” — that they competed with the push to vaccinate everyone and with the new antiviral pills.
He points to that November–December 2021 calendar: Health Equity Initiative killed, Paxlovid purchase order in the billions, then the nationwide antibody freeze the same day Paxlovid got its EUA.
That’s a coincidence, or it isn’t. White is sure which one it is.
In October 2026, White says he filed corporate whistleblower submissions with the Department of Justice (October 6, 9, and 29) alleging fraud in HHS government contracts, and has asked DOJ, the HHS Office of Inspector General, and Congress to investigate. These are allegations. No company has been charged. Pfizer and Merck should be invited to respond.
White says he has taken the case to Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. “We are never going to stop until we have the truth and justice,” he said.
The Ask
They want the new leadership at Main Justice, under Attorney General Todd Blanche and Acting Deputy AG Trent McCotter, to drop the case before January. The guests say former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich has asked President Trump to look at it. (Flag: Ehrlich letter date still unverified in our notes — Sep 2025 letter is on dropthecase.com; guests referenced a newer ask around Oct 30, 2026. Confirm before locking.)
“This is not political,” Ron said. “People are dead, and someone needs to figure out how many people died, why they died.”
Watch the full interview. To read the case documents or support Ron’s defense, go to dropthecase.com. A GiveSendGo link is on the site.
We do this in the spirit of the late Warner Mendenhall, who never stopped asking questions.
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