The coronavirus is apparently a laughing matter for the president.
President Donald Trump claimed Friday he was just cracking a sarcastic joke when he suggested doctors could cure the deadly virus by injecting disinfectants like bleach straight into people’s lungs.
Trump offered the questionable walk-back after his outrageous suggestion drew widespread rebuke from disinfectant manufacturers, emergency agencies and health experts who stressed that the president’s proposal was extremely dangerous and not advisable.
“I said it sarcastically,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
Incorrectly, the president continued by saying he floated the supposed wisecrack as a clap-back question to “fake news” reporters present for Thursday’s coronavirus briefing at the White House.
“I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you, just to see what would happen,” Trump said.
Despite Trump’s retelling, he did not raise the proposal in the form of a question to journalists.
Rather, he directed the wild claim to a senior science official from the Department of Homeland Security who had given a presentation at the briefing on the effectiveness of using disinfectants to kill the virus on surfaces — not inside people’s bodies.
“I see the disinfectant, where it 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 because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs so it’d be interesting to check that. … It sounds interesting to me,” Trump said, turning to the DHS official, William Bryan, who sat stone-faced to the side with Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force.
Trump didn’t smile, laugh or otherwise indicate that he was supposedly joking, and neither did Bryan or Birx.
In fact, Trump’s disinfectant statement came as part of a lengthier coronavirus soliloquy, in which he also suggested the deadly infection could be cured by bringing ultraviolet light “inside the body.”
“Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too — sounds interesting,” Trump said.
Excessive UV light exposure can cause cancer. While some research suggests coronavirus particles die off faster in direct sunlight, there’s no evidence to suggest that the infection could somehow be cured by bringing UV rays inside a patient’s body.
Ingesting disinfectants such as bleach, meanwhile, is lethal.
Before Trump tried to clean up his disinfectant comments with the sarcasm defense, public health experts in both private and public life had to go into overdrive to alert people to the dangers of ingesting any type of disinfectant.
“As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route),” Reckitt Benckiser, the United Kingdom-based owner of the popular Lysol brand, said in a statement.
Emergency agencies across the country, meanwhile, said they fielded a barrage of calls from people wondering whether they should follow Trump’s disinfectant advice.
“Do NOT ingest or inject Lysol or any other disinfectant as a treatment for #COVID19. Household disinfectants are poisonous and can cause serious harm or even death if swallowed or injected,” the New York City Department of Health tweeted.
In a disturbing development, a spokesman for the city’s Poison Control Center, a subagency of the Health Department, told the Daily News that it managed 30 cases involving residents who had been exposed to bleach or other household cleaners in the period between Trump’s Thursday comments and Friday at 3 p.m. Nine of the cases specifically involved exposure to Lysol.
None of the reported cases was fatal, and it wasn’t clear if any of the people exposed had directly acted on Trump’s suggestion. However, during the same 18-hour period last year, the Poison Control Center only managed a total of 13 cases involving exposure to household products.
During his Oval Office appearance on Friday, Trump claimed he “of course” doesn’t believe people should inject disinfectants into their lungs.
But he didn’t completely back off his UV musings.
“Maybe there is something to light and the human body, and helping people that are dying, okay?” he said.
Amid the disinfectant chaos, Trump for the first time did not take any questions during his daily coronavirus briefing later Friday. The briefing ended in just 20 minutes after Vice President Mike Pence gave some perfunctory updates on COVID-19 testing.
Casting further doubt over Trump’s disinfectant backpedaling, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany did not mention sarcasm in a statement issued before the president’s Oval Office appearance.
“Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines,” McEnany said without explaining how his comments were supposedly misreported.
Also Friday, Trump’s own Food and Drug Administration had to warn people to not follow another piece of dubious medical advice from the president.
“Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have not been shown to be safe and effective for treating or preventing COVID-19,” the FDA said in a statement, referring to a couple of drugs commonly used for malaria that Trump has repeatedly hyped as coronavirus miracle cures.
The FDA issued the guidance after finding that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can cause “abnormal” and “dangerous” heart rhythms. The agency said the drugs should only be administered for COVID-19 use under close medical supervision and advised doctors against prescribing them as take-home medicines.
Trump has for weeks touted the drugs as a coronavirus “game changer.”
“I want them to try it and it may work and it may not work. But if it doesn’t work, it’s nothing lost by doing it,” Trump said at an April 5 briefing.
An Arizona man recently died from drinking a product that contained hydroxychloroquine after watching the president push the drug as a COVID-19 cure on TV.
Democrats feared Trump’s disinfectant comments could cause similar tragedies.
“Please don’t poison yourself because Donald Trump thinks it could be a good idea,” Hillary Clinton tweeted.
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(With assistance from Anna Sanders.)
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