White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany blamed the media Friday for the negative attention President Trump’s comments about injecting disinfectant has received.
“President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing,” McEnany said in a statement. “Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”
The media wasn’t the only industry to respond to Trump’s unsafe suggestion. Lysol — the manufacturer of cleaning products — put out a statement early Friday morning stating that “under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).”
During his coronavirus press briefing Thursday, Trump said, “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful — light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said, ‘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. And then 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? Like injection inside or almost a cleaning because, you see, it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number in the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”
His injection comments not only became fodder for Friday’s morning shows, but also Twitter, where numerous trending topics involving “Clorox,” “Lysol” and “bleach” trended overnight Thursday into Friday morning.
The matter was all but settled in realtime Thursday, though. At the briefing, Trump turned to Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, and asked that she speak to doctors to “see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure” the virus.
“Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor, but I’m, like, a person that has a good you know what,” Trump said, pointing to his head. The president then asked Birx if she’d ever heard of the technique.
“Not as a treatment,” Birx replied.