‘Injecting disinfectant into your body will kill you’: Doctors hit back at Trump’s latest idea to beat coronavirus

Donald Trump speculated at his latest coronavirus press briefing that cleaning products could be explored as an injectable treatment for coronavirus – prompting many medics, including government advisers, to jump in and explain how dangerous it is to administer disinfectant intravenously.

Addressing his adviser Deborah Birx in front of the press corps, Mr Trump pondered out loud how household products known to kill the coronavirus could work inside the human body. “I see that 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?

“Because you see, it gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors with… so it sounds interesting to me.”

The reaction was swift.

FDA commissioner Dr Stephen Hahn, who himself sits on the government’s coronavirus told CNN that he “certainly wouldn’t recommend the internal ingestion of a disinfectant”; on the same discussion panel, Baltimore health commissioner warned viewers: “Do not try these things at home, and follow your doctor’s advice and follow good public health guidance.”

Dr Eugene Gu, a politically active physician with a large social media following, tweeted bluntly that “Injecting disinfectant into your body will kill you.

“While it feels completely unnecessary to even say this, people drank fish tank cleaner containing chloroquine because of what they heard from rumors about the substance. We must fight deadly misinformation no matter how stupid.”

Dr Gu’s reference to fish tank cleaner concerns an Arizona man who died after he and his wife drank chloroquine, which they mistook for hydroxychloroquine – a drug aggressively pushed as a coronavirus treatment by Mr Trump and Fox News. Both sources have now pivoted away from the drug since the release of a study that showed no positive effect.

Dr Gu continued in another tweet. “Clorox, Tide Pods, and Lysol will kill the coronavirus. No question about it. But if you are infected, then the coronavirus is inside your cells. If you use any of those disinfectants to kill the coronavirus within your own cells, then you’ll die right along with the coronavirus.”

Many other other doctors and nurses chimed in on social media, using the hashtag #MedTwitter. One commented that even her nine-year-old child is aware that disinfectants are toxic.

Along with musing on the possibility of injecting cleaning products, Mr Trump noted that there are signs the virus cannot survive long in direct sunlight, and speculated that UV rays could be used to eradicate the virus from the body – “supposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way”.

Dr Birx responded: “Not as a treatment.”