When it comes to coronavirus, the media is more reckless than Trump

The countless articles warning the public not to inject or consume bleach after Thursday’s coronavirus task force briefing screamed out “Don’t inject Lysol!” Articles like the one that ran in the New York Daily News about an uptick in people calling poison control, would have readers believe that Trump stood up on national television to say that if people mainlined bleach they would be cured of coronavirus.

But looking a little deeper shows that this was not the case. “The city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said that in an 18-hour period ending at 3 p.m. Friday, the poison control center recorded 30 cases. These included nine ‘specifically about exposure to Lysol, 10 cases specifically about bleach and 11 cases about exposures to other household cleaners,’ department spokesperson Pedro F. Frisneda tells NPR. That compares with only 13 cases for the same time frame one year ago.”

However, on April 21, days before the Trump press conference disinfectant controversy, The New York Times ran an article about the uptick in calls to poison control about household cleaning products. A doctor who works at a New Jersey poison control hotline, Dr. Diane P. Calello, noted that “People are home and they are frightened and they want to get their home and their food as clean as possible. Common sense can take a back seat.”

Among those cases that she cited were a woman who accidentally wiped disinfectant on her face and hands, kids who accidentally ate hand sanitizer, including one pre-schooler who was found unresponsive but later recovered. One woman made herself sick after mixing bleach and vinegar and breathing in the resulting chlorine gas.

None of these people had heard Donald Trump’s thoughts on disinfection. Yet the article states that some health care providers “wondered if the accidental poisonings were an insidious, secondary result of the coronavirus’s spread. The group initiated the study to determine if there was a possible link between the rise in exposures and the recommendations from public health agencies to clean and disinfect as much as possible.”

Despite the fact that poison control centers do not record the reasons that people ingested the cleaners, a study has been formed to find out how to blame Trump for it.

Putting aside for a moment that an increase of 17 cases in New York does not mean we have a pandemic of stupidity on our hands, ingesting harmful substances isn’t the only household behaviour that’s increased since this time last year. Burn accidents are on the rise, because more people are at home cooking. Doctors are noting that domestic accidents across the board are increasing, and it’s because our entire lives have become domestic. It’s sort of dumb logic, but all things being equal, mainstream media finds it easier to blame Trump.

It has gotten so absurd that even when something Trump says with regard to medical treatments for coronavirus pans out, or gets research attention, it is pilloried simply because of its association with Trump.

During the press conference where Trump candidly discussed the properties of disinfectants, he also mentioned the disinfecting properties of the various elements of sunlight. In fact, a company called AYTU BioScience has been investigating that in cooperation with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with its “Healight” project.

Unsurprisingly, Aytu and its project were soon deleted—censored off of YouTube thanks to a busybody New York Times writer who specializes in “disinformation.”

So, let’s recap: Trump expresses an interest in the properties of sunlight and disinfectants. The Never-Trump establishment media sees an opportunity and pounces—headlines falsely imply that Trump is advising that Americans ingest household cleaners and disinfectants. The headlines are way more dangerous than anything the president said. But then, It turns out there actually is a potential treatment involving injecting a disinfectant element of UV rays into the human body. An agent of the Never-Trump establishment media goes on a crusade to have the company behind the potential treatment wiped from the internet.

This ongoing crusade to discredit what Trump says simply because there is an assumption that if he said it then it must not be true is evidenced even further by mainstream media outlets like CNN and MSNBC who refuse to air press conferences in their entirety. YouTube is now getting into the act, joining Twitter and Facebook, whose campaigns against "misinformation" have more to do with supporting an anti-Trump narrative than vouchsafing facts.

Imagine for a moment that a treatment like the Healight or hydroxychloroquine turn out to be essential treatments in eradicating coronavirus forever. We're not saying they will be, but just imagine that that's how it ends up. What kind of legacy does that leave for the media who breathlessly trying to lobby against them?

This entire crisis has been unprecedented in modern memory. It has baffled the imaginations of many of our leaders and pundits. Looking into a multitude of potential solutions is a necessary approach. And think about it: Trump has the benefit of working with and inevitably relying on legitimate medical experts like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx whereas the media colludes with frothing quacks like Dr. Eugene Gu. In the end, which side is more dangerous to the American people?

You don’t have to be a Trump fan to see that the media’s obsessive yearning for his demise is a way bigger problem than his off-the-cuff way of phrasing his ideas. It’s a depressing thought—so many people have become toxically invested in Trump losing that they end up on the virus’s side. In some ways, they have become the virus.