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In 2021, Dr. Ron Elfenbein, a physician who operated FirstCall Medical Center in Maryland, went on Fox News to criticize the Biden administration’s policies limiting access to monoclonal antibodies. Speaking during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Elfenbein insisted that monoclonal antibodies were effective in treating COVID-19.
Four months later, the federal government indicted Elfenbein on five counts of fraudulent coding and billing at his clinics, alleging that Elfenbein “upcoded” by billing for a higher level of treatment than provided.
But Elfenbein said he believes the charges were motivated by his support for monoclonal antibodies — and a federal judge agreed.
In August 2023, a jury found Elfenbein guilty. But in response to Elfenbein’s motion for acquittal, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar threw out the jury’s verdict and acquitted Elfenbein in December 2023.
In his 93-page ruling, Bredar said the government did not present enough evidence to convict Elfenbein, instead relying on “loose definitions” and an “imperfect” set of standards governing medical coding.
“The evidence weighs so heavily in favor of the defendant that it would be unjust to enter judgment against him,” Bredar wrote.
“That kind of post-verdict acquittal is extraordinarily rare,” said Dr. Kirk Moore, a Utah plastic surgeon who last year was acquitted on federal charges that he issued falsified COVID-19 vaccination cards. “Judges almost never overturn juries. Bredar did it because the case was just that empty.”
Yet, in the final days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) appealed. In July 2025, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the original jury had enough evidence to convict Elfenbein and sent the case back to the trial court.
“The government doesn’t get to lose, apparently,” Moore said. “They just get to keep swinging, bullying their way through a judicial system that is now built for this exact purpose.”
In December 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Elfenbein’s appeal.
In an interview with The Defender, Elfenbein said that his new trial is scheduled for January 2027. He believes he is unfairly being targeted as a “whistleblower” who was trying to help the public during a global pandemic and who was charged despite a lack of evidence against him.
He faces up to 50 years in prison if convicted on all five charges.
Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, said the case against Elfenbein is “inexplicable” and that there were no coding errors or any criminal intent.
“Nobody was harmed. No patient was harmed. No insurance company was harmed. The federal government was harmed,” Kirsch said — because promoting monoclonal antibodies undermined the government’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccines.
Government’s case ‘the height of bureaucratic arrogance’
According to Elfenbein, his network of clinics rapidly expanded operations early during the COVID-19 pandemic in response to “unprecedented” circumstances.
“No one really understood what to do. Everything was sort of ‘fly by the seat of your pants.’ So, we had to invent everything,” Elfenbein said. He cited the example of drive-up COVID-19 testing with provider evaluation, which he said his clinics were the first to offer in Maryland.
“At one point, we were seeing over 1,000 patients a day across six different or eight different sites. And we had to figure out how to accommodate that,” Elfenbein said.
Elfenbein said that at his drive-up testing sites and in his urgent care facilities, patients would communicate with practitioners virtually through a television screen and microphone. Their results would then be delivered electronically.
In 2021, Elfenbein began offering monoclonal antibodies to COVID-19 patients. At the request of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, he set up a monoclonal antibody clinic at FedEx Field outside of Washington, D.C.
In an April interview with The MAHA Report, Elfenbein said the clinics performed 5,000 infusions.
Monoclonal antibodies are produced in labs and designed to replicate the immune system’s response to pathogens. Elfenbein said the treatments — and his test-and-treat model, where patients would be tested and treated at the same site — were successful and became “the model for the entire country moving forward.”
“It was like battlefield medicine, just trying to improvise and do as much as you can and as much good as you can in as little amount of time as possible,” Elfenbein said.
Elfenbein said that despite their success in treating COVID-19 patients, the Biden administration significantly curtailed the use of monoclonal antibodies in December 2021, making it much more difficult for practitioners in certain states to obtain the treatment.
That same month, Elfenbein told Fox News that people were “going to die” as a result of not having access to monoclonal antibodies. He made similar remarks in an interview with Newsmax during this period.
“It’s just the height of bureaucratic arrogance, and it’s … horrible,” Elfenbein told Fox News at the time.
The ‘government’s looking to put me in jail for 50 years … over $250’
Four months later, in April 2022, Elfenbein was out with his son when he received a phone call from his clinic, informing him that two federal agents wanted to speak with him. He later learned that the DOJ planned to indict him on healthcare fraud charges.
While the circumstances of his indictment were initially unclear, Elfenbein said he learned during the pre-trial discovery phase that undercover agents posing as patients had visited his testing facilities after his Fox News interview.
The DOJ alleged that, in the case of five patients who visited Elfenbein’s testing facilities, insurers were charged more than they should have been for the level of treatment provided, as a result of “upcoding.”
According to Elfenbein, there are “four different codes you can pick from when you’re doing evaluation and management” of a patient, ranging from level 2 to level 5. “Normally, in most cases, you should get a bell curve” among the different levels, Elfenbein said. But during the pandemic, this changed.
“There’s a pandemic going on. We’re not seeing ankle sprains. We’re not seeing elbow sprains. We’re not seeing lacerations. We’re seeing COVID and that was it.”
Most COVID-19 patients were coded as level-4 patients, which he said was the norm across medical facilities during that time.
According to Healthcare Law Insights, the codes are imprecise, which “makes for difficult federal prosecutions.”
“There is purpose in [the] codes’ imprecision in that it allows physicians flexibility to exercise their best judgment given the multitude of factors that go into medical decision-making,” Healthcare Law Insights reported.
In the case of Elfenbein, the initial judge found a lack of evidence that Elfenbein’s level-4 coding was “objectively false.”
In an amicus brief filed on Elfenbein’s behalf in October 2024, the American Medical Association (AMA) agreed, writing, “Clinicians must be able to exercise their judgment without fear of inadvertently facing allegations of wrongdoing.”
Elfenbein said this is significant because the AMA developed the ICD-10 medical coding system that’s currently in use.
Elfenbein said:
“The American Medical Association owns that. Everybody uses ICD-10. And, by the way, there are over 69,000 possible codes in ICD-10. And the government alleged we chose the wrong code out of 69,000, five charts out of over 100,000, in the timeframe of the indictment during a global pandemic.”
Elfenbein said prosecutors couldn’t identify which code should have been assigned to those five patients instead of level 4, but that the difference between level 4 and level 3 amounts to approximately $50.
“The government’s looking to put me in jail for 50 years, destroy my life, take away my livelihood, over $250,” Elfenbein said.
“The … definitions for level-4 evaluation and management codes are inherently subjective — they depend on ‘medical decision-making’ complexity, not a stopwatch,” Moore said. “If you’re going to charge a man with fraud for using the wrong code, you should probably be able to say what the right code is. They couldn’t, wouldn’t and ultimately, didn’t.”
‘This is a case of shoot first and ask questions later’
Elfenbein told The Defender that while he does not have hard evidence proving that the DOJ’s case against him is retaliatory, the timing of his indictment shortly after his Fox News and Newsmax interviews is likely not coincidental.
“Temporally, I went on Fox News, and I got indicted almost to the day, four months later. Putting the two things together, it seems to make sense in my mind that this is what set them off,” Elfenbein said.
He suggested that the government’s case against him appeared to have been hastily constructed, further suggesting that the DOJ was targeting him on retaliatory grounds rather than on the strength of the evidence.
“They indicted me before they had the [patients’] charts. They didn’t even know what was in the charts,” Elfenbein said. Federal investigators did not speak to his business partners, who were responsible for billing, and never cross-examined a professional medical coder.
According to Elfenbein, the government’s own witnesses also undermined the DOJ’s case during the first trial. While prosecutors alleged that the five visits in question were too quick for the number of procedures that were coded, a government witness testified that “time is irrelevant for coding” and that the tests were “medically necessary.”
“This was a case where even the chief judge said, ‘This is a case of shoot first and ask questions later.’ No real investigation had been done,” Elfenbein said. “That’s pretty telling, for a federal judge to say that to the prosecution.”
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Promotion of a non-vaccine treatment ‘posed a huge threat’
Elfenbein said he believes his public statements about the effectiveness of monoclonal antibodies threatened the COVID-19 vaccine enterprise.
The COVID-19 shots were issued under emergency use authorization, which is customarily revoked once other effective treatments are identified and licensed.
Elfenbein said his clinics had become the largest supplier of monoclonal antibodies in the mid-Atlantic region, which “posed a huge threat.”
“It was a direct threat to the emergency use authorization of the vaccine,” he said. “I think I was the easiest fall guy … I was out all the time beating the drum, answering phone calls, talking to people, answering Facebook messages, taking questions, anything I could do to help.”
Moore agreed. “The monoclonal antibody ban was transparently about clearing the field for the vaccines. If there’s an effective early treatment available, the urgency to get jabbed drops considerably.”
By making monoclonal antibodies available despite government efforts to curtail their use, and by subsequently criticizing the government on that front, Elfenbein said he, in effect, became a whistleblower.
“I went on Fox News and I said, ‘The government doesn’t know what it’s doing, and it is gonna kill people.’ If that’s not a whistleblower, I don’t know what is.”
Related articles in The Defender
- Is Pharma ‘Stalking’ Him? British Doctor Could Lose Medical License for Questioning COVID Vaccines
- ‘They Stole His Practice’: Medical Board Drops Case Against Canadian Doctor Who Questioned COVID Vaccines
- CHD Asks Supreme Court to Pause Disciplinary Actions Against Doctors Who Criticized COVID Policies
- ‘Medical Warfare’: Doctors Who Questioned COVID Shots, Promoted Ivermectin Lose Certification
- Dr. Pierre Kory: To Expose the Truth, ‘You’ve Got to Navigate Through the Censors’
- Dr. Meryl Nass Rejects Maine Medical Board’s Conditions for Reinstating Medical License
