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For the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Thursday April 23, 2020, would turn out to be one of those wasted days. President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are declining, the number of unemployed is rising into historic dimensions. White House reporters were needling him about missing ventilators, the lack of protective gear for medical personnel, and almost 60,000 COVID-19 deaths, more than the number of Americans who died on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Instinctively, Donald Trump saw an opening that would secure some applause from his voter base. An Army biological laboratory outside Washington had discovered that simple household bleach is able to tame COVID-19 on a surface in a few minutes. Not only that, sunlight appears to have a powerful effect, killing the virus on surfaces and in the air. Trump, who in the past has praised his own “natural instinct for science”, offered his vision. Disinfectant, he said, “knocks it, coronavirus, out in a minute. One minute. Is there a way we can do something like that by injecting inside or almost a cleaning?” The President turned to Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator: “Suppose that we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light. Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can either through the skin or in some other way… It’s a great thing to look at.”
Injecting Disinfectants into the Body
The President of the United States suddenly seemed like the emperor without clothes, accused of endangering the health of American citizens by suggesting bleach as a secret drug of survival. Chlorine bleach can and does kill people who drink it. Mr Trump’s comments prompted an “explosion of warnings” about the dangers of any improvised remedies, reported the New York Times. Trump “has been lambasted by the medical community after suggesting research into whether coronavirus might be treated by injecting disinfectant into the body”, confirmed the BBC. Following Trump’s comments, the producer of the disinfecting bleach Lysol urged customers not to consume its cleaning products: “…under no circumstances should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route)”. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported hundreds of calls from people asking their poison centers for clarification of the President’s plans.
A day later the President said he had been misunderstood, although the press conference was filmed and recorded. Whatever he said about light infiltration and bleach injections was meant to be “very sarcastic” and a provocation of the White House reporters, who the President qualified in a tweet as “corrupt & sick”. Trump considered canceling any further briefings on COVID-19 on the basis that reporters “ask nothing but hostile questions & then refuse to report the facts accurately”.
Archbishop of Genesis II
The President returned a few days later, again boasting that the U.S. was the envy of the world for its efficient combating of the virus, and that he had saved millions of lives by closing the borders to travelers from China in the early days of the pandemic. A reporter dared to ask Trump about his light and injection scheme, but the President refused to answer.
The British newspaper The Guardian, however, provided news that excited the media: a Mark Grenon had informed the President in a letter days before the press briefing that chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing, is a “wonderful detox that can kill 99 percent of the pathogens in the body”, including COVID-19. Grenon, The Guardian revealed, styles himself as an “archbishop” of Genesis II, a Florida organization that claims to be a church, but is “the largest producer and distributor of chlorine dioxide bleach as ‘miracle cure’ in the US”. Grenon markets his chemical as a “miracle mineral solution”. A day after Trump’s excursion into medicine, Grenon claimed on Facebook that his solution had been sent to the White House and Trump had “all the info!!! Things are happening folks! Lord help others to see the Truth!” Paradoxically, noted The Guardian, Trump’s excursion into the medical world came just days after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained a federal court order barring Genesis II from selling what was described as an “unproven and potentially harmful treatment for COVID-19”.
Drinking Bleach to Cure the Virus
Unfounded and harmful coronavirus treatments, reported NBC News, “including those that were floated by President Donald Trump, continue to spread online, evading efforts to crack down on misinformation”. In other words, fear of COVID-19 and the search for a miraculous remedy has not only grabbed the imagination of Donald Trump, but has turned into a global industry. By the end of February, Amazon had removed more than one million products that claimed to cure or protect against coronavirus. “We’ve taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19”, said Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg, though Avaaz, a crowd-funded activist group that carried out a major study of misinformation on the platform, says millions of Facebook users continue to be exposed to coronavirus misinformation. Some of the most dangerous falsehoods had received hundreds of thousands of views, Avaaz found.
Misinformation claiming isopropyl alcohol cures coronavirus led to the deaths of dozens of Iranians in March. The governor of Nairobi was also convinced that he knew how to eradicate COVID-19. He included small bottles of Hennessy cognac in care packages for the poor, falsely claiming that alcohol acts as a throat sanitizer. Donald Trump was supported by his favorite TV channel Fox News when he identified the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible remedy. “It’s shown very encouraging—very, very encouraging early results”, the President declared in a press conference at the White House, ignoring the fact that reliable tests had not been completed. Before any tests were concluded, Trump pressured drug makers to donate millions and millions of these miracle pills. Researchers warned that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine could cause interrupted heart beat or cardiac arrhythmia, thus posing particular risks for critically ill persons. One survey found higher death rates among COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine. The President hardly ever mentions his wonder drug anymore. At least for now.
The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author.
