A federal judge acquitted me. The Biden DOJ appealed anyway. Now I’m facing retrial in August.
My name is Dr. Ron Elfenbein, and I’m an emergency physician. My whole career has been about running toward crises, not away from them. When COVID-19 hit, I did what responsible doctors do: I built testing sites and set up monoclonal antibody clinics to get lifesaving treatment to people who had nowhere else to turn. The clinic we built at FedEx Field, in partnership with the federal and Maryland state governments, treated thousands of Marylanders who otherwise would have gone without care.
Then I made the mistake of telling the truth on television and in print media.
In December 2021 I spoke to Fox News and went on Newsmax and said what I believed: the Biden Administration’s decision to halt monoclonal antibody treatments was wrong, the reasoning was politically motivated, and people were going to die because of it. I said it because it was true and because I’m a doctor and staying silent felt like its own kind of malpractice.
Four months later, federal agents came for me with no phone call, no warning, and no conversation—just an indictmenton five felony counts of healthcare fraud. The entire case was built on the claim that my clinics had used the wrong billing code for COVID testing visits. Not that any patients were harmed. Not that services went unperformed. Just a billing code—the same one, it turns out, that other clinics all over the country were using for the exact same services. The government never even looked at our patient charts before they charged me. And to put it into perspective, there are over 69,000 ICD-10 billing codes. Even the judge said the prosecution looked like a “case of shoot first and ask questions later.”Subscribe
What happened next is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I lost my ability to practice emergency medicine and I lost the ability to treat Medicare patients—the elderly, the vulnerable, the very people I went into medicine to serve. I lost my business and watched everything I had built, everything I had sacrificed for, get dismantled not because of any finding of wrongdoing but because of the sheer weight of a federal prosecution hanging over my name.
I watched my wife carry a burden no spouse should ever have to carry, and I watched my four children grow up in the shadow of one word—“indicted”—that they were too young to fully understand. There were nights I couldn’t sleep and mornings I wasn’t sure I could keep going. The mental and physical toll of these last four years is something I still struggle to put into words, and I’m a man who talks to patients about hard things for a living.
Despite the weakness of the government’s case, I was convicted at trial. But Chief Judge James Bredar, the trial judge who heard the evidence and an appointee of President Obama, subsequently acquitted me. He wrote a 93-page opinionexplaining why no reasonable jury should have convicted me, and he condemned the prosecution’s failures in plain, unsparing language. The American Medical Association—the same organization that wrote the coding rules the government accused me of misreading—filed a brief on my behalf. And according to a former Deputy Attorney General, the opinion was a “tour de force” and “sends a strong message to leaders of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.”
And still it continues. The Biden DOJ appealed days before they left office, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals remanded my case to the District Court level for a new trial this August. Strikingly, Judge Bredar just recused himself from adjudicating the new trial. My family and I have to brace ourselves for another round—more legal fees, more headlines, more painful conversations with my kids about why Daddy is still in trouble for something the chief federal judge of Maryland already said he didn’t do.
I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing this because what happened to me can happen to any physician, any citizen, who steps forward in a national crisis and dares to publicly disagree with those in power. The chill this case has sent through the medical community is real. Doctors who watched what happened to me will think twice before going on television, before speaking at a town hall, before telling their patients something that contradicts the official line. That silence has a cost too—and patients end up paying it. More than that, this sends the message: DO NOT do the right thing. Stay home, don’t step up when the need arises and when society needs you most.
Weaponization Watch has stood with me and with others like me because they understand what is really at stake. This isn’t just my case. It’s a test of whether the federal government can use its prosecutorial power to punish dissent under the cover of regulatory enforcement—and whether the authorities have the courage and the integrity to say: enough.
I’m asking the White House and the Department of Justice to look at what was done in the people’s name and drop this case. Not because I want special treatment, but because justice requires it.
I just want my life back. I want to go back to work. I want to take my kids to school in the morning without this hanging over all of us.
That is all I have ever wanted.
Dr. Ron Elfenbein is a Maryland emergency physician and founder of one of the state’s largest COVID-19 testing and monoclonal antibody treatment networks. His case, United States v. Elfenbein, is scheduled for retrial in August 2026. Support him on GiveSendGo. Sign the petition here. For more on the case or to contact Dr. Elfenbein, visit dropthecase.com.