God bless all of you who can watch even one second of Donald Trump’s daily briefings, which veer from “stupid Nazi rallies” to “medical advice from Josef Mengele.” Apparently, Thursday’s briefing quickly veered more towards a Mengele-style advice session as Trump decided to riff on what doctors were saying about sunlight and disinfectant, and ended up suggesting that A) sunshine and heat could kill the virus and B) disinfectant injected into the lungs could kill the virus.
President Donald Trump suggested the possibility of an “injection” of disinfectant into a person infected with the coronavirus as a deterrent to the virus during his daily briefing Thursday. Trump made the remark after Bill Bryan, who leads the Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology division, gave a presentation on research his team has conducted that shows that the virus doesn’t live as long in warmer and more humid temperatures. Bryan said, “The virus dies quickest in sunlight,” leaving Trump to wonder whether you could bring the light “inside the body.”
“There’s been a rumor that — you know, a very nice rumor — that you go outside in the sun or you have heat and it does have an effect on other viruses,” Trump said, before asking coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx “to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure.” Trump then asked Birx if she “ever heard of the heat and the light” having an impact on viruses. She responded, “Not as a treatment,” before Trump asked her again to look into it. Later, Trump again directed Birx to look into the potential for sunlight to be a cure.
“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn’t been checked because of the testing,” Trump said, speaking to Bryan during the briefing. “And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too…I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure, you know, if you could. And maybe you can, maybe you can’t.”
After Bryan talked about experiments in which, he said, disinfectants like bleach and isopropyl alcohol quickly killed the virus, Trump mused about whether disinfectants could be used to treat the virus in humans: “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
[From NBC News & CNN]
Yes, Donald Trump literally stood at a podium inside the White House and suggested that Americans find some way to inject themselves with bleach to kill the virus. Every medical correspondent got on the air across every channel (well, not Fox News) to say that OF COURSE NO ONE SHOULD DO THIS. Please, MAGA peeps, do not inject yourselves with bleach. Do not cut yourselves open to expose your blood and organs to the sunshine. I cannot believe it needs to be said, but you know *someone* will probably try it. DO NOT.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 23, 2020
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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