If you took yesterday off from politics to focus on the NFL Draft, you might have woken up this morning wondering what everyone was talking about. Why, for example, is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on NPR saying, “We seemed to have a quack medicine salesman on television. He’s talking about things like disinfectant in the lungs?”
What does that mean? What does the former First Lady mean by this?
Please don’t poison yourself because Donald Trump thinks it could be a good idea.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 24, 2020
So, the president went on television and told people to poison themselves and put disinfectant in their lungs? Can that be right?
The manufacturer for Lysol, a disinfectant spray and cleaning product, issued a statement warning against any internal use after President Trump suggested that people could get an “injection” of “the disinfectant that knocks coronavirus out in a minute,” NBC News reports.
Wait, what? He told people to slam Lysol into their veins? What else did he say?
Trump suggested at a White House news briefing Thursday that scientists should test beaming ultraviolet light “inside the body” and injecting disinfectants in an effort to find new coronavirus remedies.
“Supposing you hit the body with ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it? Then I said supposing that you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way. And I think you said, you’re going to test that, too.”
Unless you’re going to crack open people’s ribs, there’s only so many orifices to choose from if you want to shine a light “inside the body.” It looks like Trump has been surfing Facebook again:
Facebook pages created in late March sold UV “sanitizer” lights, promising “a proven impact on COVID-19” and to be the “most effective way to kill viruses.” The companies, which had names like “Beam Sanitizer,” ran ads on Instagram and Facebook in March, according to Facebook’s ad library. Some ads, including ones from companies including UV Sanitizers, and Uvlizer, were still active as of Friday morning. The products apparently evaded the company’s ban of ads for coronavirus miracle cures instituted last month.
In an effort to quell the impact of viral social media posts, the World Health Organization released a warning in March stating that “UV lamps should not be used to sterilize hands or other areas of skin as UV radiation can cause skin irritation.”
Fortunately, the president left us a brief clue about where he got these ideas. Someone told him that you can kill the virus on surfaces very quickly by using anti-viral wipes or UV light. I might add that soapy water works just as well, but for some reason he didn’t suggest we inhale soapy water.
“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute,” Trump said during Thursday’s coronavirus press briefing. “And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
To say that the president is biology-challenged would be an understatement. The virus does its damage by invading cells, not by living on their surface. You can’t just open up people’s lungs and wipe them down with Clorox wipes.
Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and global health policy expert who is an NBC News and MSNBC contributor, told NBC News on Thursday that “injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible, and it’s dangerous.”
“It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves,” Gupta said.
So, Hillary Clinton was right. The president did essentially tell people to poison themselves because he thought it was a good idea. Only an impossibly stupid person would think this was a good idea, but we have an impossibly stupid person running our country.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration finally issued a finding that Trump’s “miracle cure” for Covid-19 will get you killed.
The Food and Drug Administration warned Friday that people should not take chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 outside of a hospital or formal clinical trial, citing reports of “serious heart rhythm problems.”
Many of those adverse effects occurred in patients with the virus who were treated with the anti-malaria drugs, often in combination with azithromycin, also known as Z-Pak. President Trump has described such drugs as a potential “game-changer,” although results from clinical trials are not yet in to show whether they are effective…
…The adverse events reported include abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation, dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation, and in some cases, death, the agency said.
I’ve often compared Trump to the generic drunk at the end of the bar who spends his time regaling other patrons and the bartender with his unhinged conspiracy theories. That’s who we elected president, and when we had a chance to remove him office while there was still time to save the country, the Republicans balked out of pure cowardice.
Now there’s a body count that just officially surpassed fifty thousand.
