When Hatzalah CEO Eli Beer was lying in the ICU of the  University of Miami Medical Center, critically ill due to the coronavirus, one of the people who helped save his life was Dr. Joel Sandberg, the father of Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.

Dr. Sandberg, who is part of the Hatzalah board, is a physician and voluntary professor of ophthalmology at the University of Miami Medical Center.

“I was intimately involved in his entire hospital course,” Sandberg said in an interview with Jewish Insider (JI). “It was just natural for me to be his medical advocate,”

Sandberg spoke to the medical staff treating Beer on a constant basis, analyzed Beer’s lab data and updated Beer’s wife, Gitty, three times a day. He also compiled a report once or twice a day and sent it to a team at Hatzalah. “Basically, I was doing this full-time,” Sandberg said.

When Beer and Sandberg met for the first time years ago on a flight from Miami to New York, Sandberg told Beer that he was familiar with Hatzalah and had donated money to it. The next morning, Beer met Dr. Sandberg and his wife Adele for breakfast and their connection grew from there. The Sandbergs became involved in the Hatzlah cause and donated an ambulance and ambucycle.

When Beer was sick, Sandberg made sure to update the hospital staff about whom exactly they were treating. “I told everyone who he was and that we wanted to do everything possible,” he said. “I would email them his Wikipedia page and tell them to look up his TED Talk. And when I was on the phone, I would just tell them about Eli.”

Close to the end of Beer’s five-week stay in the hospital, Sandberg suggested to Beer’s doctors to try an experimental stem treatment from Israel from a company called Pluristem which makes mesenchymal stem cells. They took him up on his suggestion and Beer was the first person in Miami to be treated with stem cells.

Beer recovered shortly later but Sandberg emphasized to JI that it is not entirely clear whether the stem cell therapy was the contributing factor to his recovery since there were many other factors as well. However, Pluristem’s preliminary data seems promising. The stem cells were used to treat six critically ill patients in Israel and all those who were treated survived.

Chairman of United Hatzalah, Mark Gerson, told JI that Sandberg was devoted to saving Beer. “Joel was Eli’s guardian angel every step of the way,” he said, explaining that Sandberg spoke with medical experts around the world, consulted with specialists and researched various treatments.

“He just never stopped,” lawyer Alan Dershowitz, another member of United Hatzalah’s board, told JI. “He’s not the youngest man in the world. And it was as if he was a 30-year-old new doctor. I mean, he just wouldn’t stop. He was like the Energizer Bunny. He just went on and on and on. He has accumulated more mitzvahs than anybody needs to get into heaven.”

“It was my pleasure and honor to do it,” said Sandberg, who speaks with Beer every day. “I mean, I love Eli — and he’s saving lives all the time.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)