President Donald Trump has made an alarming habit of suggesting unapproved medication and methods to help combat the coronavirus.
But on Thursday he made one of his most disturbing suggestions yet, questioning during a coronavirus briefing whether injecting a disinfectant could help combat the deadly virus and “clean” the lungs.
“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?” he queried. “As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
His comments drew swift backlash, with medical and health experts lashing out at the impeached president for voicing the dangerous thought.
“This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible and it’s dangerous,” Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and NBC News contributor told the network. “It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves.”
His comments drew such alarm that the manufacturer for Lysol cleaning products issued a warning almost immediately, even though Trump never mentioned a specific 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),” a spokesperson for Reckitt Benckiser, which owns Lysol, told NBC News in a statement.
The company noted that it felt as if it has a “responsibility in providing consumers with access to accurate, up-to-date information as advised by leading public health experts.”
In case you missed the point, and we cannot stress this enough, PLEASE, DO NOT INJECT (or ingest) ANY disinfectants, for ANY reason at all, least of all, to stop the coronavirus.
This is not the first time that the president has made suggestions and recommendations that are not only untruthful but dangerous.
Back in March, he insisted that chloroquine was an FDA-approved treatment for the virus which was unequivocally false. Many believe his comments led an Arizona man in his 60s to die after ingesting chloroquine phosphate. It also prompted health care professionals to warn against self-medication.
Trump also continued to push for the use of hydroxychloroquine, another drug that health experts cautioned was not a confirmed treatment for the virus due to the lack of testing.
“If it does work, it would be a shame we did not do it early,” he said at the beginning of April. “What do you have to lose?”