Donald Trump’s approach to coronavirus information is dangerous, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told CNN’s Brian Stelter. And while that’s not exactly news in the wake of Trump’s ultraviolet-light-and-bleach-cure advice, Murthy said that before Trump advised people to inject disinfectant to fight COVID-19.
“When you have different people in the administration saying different things at the same time, what that does is, it compromises public trust. And when you're responding to a pandemic, one of the most important resources you have is public trust. And you've gotta protect it at all costs,” Murthy told Stelter. The risk of saying different things at the same time is ”you measure the price in terms of lives lost.”
Even before Trump went ahead and offered advice likely to be fatal—in one case, a nurse was convicted of murder for injecting bleach in dialysis patients—he’d repeatedly told the public to rely on treatments that weren’t backed by science and posed dangers of their own.
The supposed coronavirus treatment Trump has hyped most aggressively, calling it a “game-changer,” is hydroxychloroquine. It leads to increased deaths, a recent study shows. “What do you have to lose?” Trump had asked. Science answered: your life. This answer came after a top vaccine development expert was fired for pushing back against the push to use hydroxychloroquine before it had been fully studied.
But the cable news networks keep airing Trump’s press briefings, only sometimes cutting away when he goes off the rails in especially spectacular fashion. And the newspapers keep reporting them according to what Trump says, with a headline of his claims followed, if we’re lucky, by weak-sauce rebuttals by experts. That makes the media complicit in compromising public trust.