“President Trump has long pinned his hopes on the powers of sunlight to defeat the Covid-19 virus,” William Broad and Dan Levin open their piece on Trump’s sunlight-and-disinfectants outburst. “On Thursday, he returned to that theme at the daily White House coronavirus briefing, bringing in a top administration scientist to back up his assertions and eagerly theorizing—dangerously, in the view of some experts—about the powers of sunlight, ultraviolet light, and household disinfectants to kill the coronavirus.”
”Dangerously, in the view of some experts.”
Perhaps what they are saying there is that some experts think it’s dangerous because someone might actually go ahead and inject themselves with bleach or somehow try to “hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light” and bring “the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way,” and that doing so would be dangerous. That is, the “some say” skepticism is not that maybe bleach injections are a good idea, it’s that anyone would ever do such a thing.
Nonethe-f’ing-less. The New York Times found a way to hedge on the advisability of suggesting people inject themselves with bleach on national television. And by the way, for any cable network still wondering whether it should stop airing Trump’s press briefings live, here’s a great reason to do so.
This wording even made it to the official New York Times tweet about this article, so top to bottom the newspaper is really committed to letting us know that experts are not unified on this issue, that there are experts who do not think it is dangerous for the president of the United States to go on live television and suggest injections of household disinfectants.
Notably, The Times did not find an expert to quote who thought this was a good idea. The experts actually quoted in the article thought it was a very bad idea, although the article doesn’t bother to quote very many experts on that question, heading off instead into contemplation of whether warmer weather will make coronavirus go away.
The Washington Post, by contrast, went with the headline "Trump asked if disinfectants could be injected to kill the coronavirus inside the body. Doctors answered: ‘People will die.’" The article under that headline has views from many more experts than the “Dangerously, in the view of some experts” Times.
Meanwhile, the manufacturer of Lysol felt compelled to go public with a warning against internal use of its product.
Comments are closed on this story.