President Donald Trump on Thursday suggested that disinfectant and light could be potential treatments for the coronavirus infection that has so far claimed nearly 50,000 American lives.
Experts, including those within his own administration, immediately warned against taking such a path.
“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 by injection inside or almost a cleaning,” Trump said. “Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
Dr. Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, first defended Trump’s “natural question” about the use of light to treat the disease.
But he also warned against using disinfectant.
“I certainly wouldn’t recommend the internal ingestion of a disinfectant,” he said on CNN.
Trump’s comments caused terms such as #Lysol, #Clorox and #TidePods, among others, to trend on Twitter as users of the social network reacted in disbelief:
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