Generic Solutions  

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

How did Moshe Rogosnitzky — a soft-spoken, erstwhile kollel yungerman living in Eretz Yisrael, with not a degree to his name — help determine the course of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus treatment last month?

Among the battery of medicines prescribed for the president by the doctors at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was a drug called famotidine — better known as Pepcid, an over-the-counter remedy for excess stomach acid. Given the president’s reputation for being more prone to giving ulcers than getting them, it might have seemed a curious choice. So how did these high-level physicians come to prescribe Pepcid for coronavirus?

Here is where Moshe Rogosnitzky comes in. As it turns out, he headed the groundbreaking research on famotidine that formed the basis of the doctors’ decision.

“We were the first ones in the medical literature to propose it as a possible treatment, following an in-depth literature analysis of potential anti-COVID-19 candidates,” says Rogosnitzky in an interview at Mishpacha. “I don’t think President Trump knows that a high-school dropout in Israel was the one to first propose it… It just shows you that by following a very low-cost, low-tech approach to the problem, rather than utilizing all the supercomputing we have now, and all the research labs, you can sometimes reach the same solutions, or even better ones, much earlier on.”